


Fledgling

by Trixree



Category: One Piece
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Depression, Everyone Needs Hugs, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kid Fic, M/M, Parent-Child Relationship, References to past trauma, Sanji is good with kids and you can pry this headcanon out of my cold dead hands, Slow Burn, lots of stuff about birds
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:07:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25407376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixree/pseuds/Trixree
Summary: Sanji sees Zoro approach from a long-ways off. His shock of green hair is unmistakable, even in a crowd. Speaking of, the crowd parts around him naturally, like water around a boat. They give him suspicious looks as he passes, and it isn’t until Zoro is within eye-shot that Sanji realizes why.There is a bundle of feathers in his arms.“What the fuck are you holding?”Zoro winces and pulls a face. “Yeah, so, I can explain."The bundle of feathers moves and the dirt-streaked face of a child peers up at him. The jumble of feathers aren’t just feathers, Sanji realizes with a jolt. They’re wings.
Relationships: Roronoa Zoro/Vinsmoke Sanji
Comments: 94
Kudos: 415





	1. Unknown

Sanji sees Zoro approach from a long-ways off. His shock of green hair is unmistakable, even in a crowd. Speaking of, the crowd parts around him naturally, like water around a boat. They give him suspicious looks as he passes, and it isn’t until Zoro is within eye-shot that Sanji realizes why. 

There is a bundle of _feathers_ in his arms. 

“What the fuck are you holding?” 

Zoro winces and pulls a face. “Yeah, so, I can explain.” For once in his damn life, the moss-brained idiot looks _sheepish_. (But there’s something else there, too. Something burning right under the surface.) 

The bundle of feathers _moves_ and the dirt-streaked face of a child peers up at him. The jumble of feathers aren’t just _feathers,_ Sanji realizes with a jolt. They’re _wings._

* * *

There are always children that live on the streets. In every town on every island, there are filthy wide-eyed little kids that scrounge up a means of living for themselves in the gaps of other people’s lives. Zoro has always known this fundamental truth; there are always kids. (Once upon a time, he was one of them.) 

This is why he always stops to talk to those kids, if he can find them. Most of them don’t trust him. Some of them do. But either way, they end up teaching him something. A lot of them are just plain useful—they know how to make money quick, they know how to cause trouble but not get caught, they know where to find cheap (or free) food and how to get it. 

At the back of a bar called _Frank’s,_ there is a large dumpster. As Zoro is asked to leave—more like he's _kicked out_ under the threat of involving the town authorities— by the owner, it just so happens that he passes by this unremarkable dumpster. (The owner spouts some bullshit about not wanting to have his image tainted by a _pirate_ walking out the front door. _As if this shitty place’s reputation could be damaged by such a thing_ , Zoro thinks bitterly. Their booze was more like piss than anything. Even the cook’s shitty froo-froo wine would have been better.) 

A metallic _thunk_ echoes through the small alley. Zoro turns his attention towards the grey, stinking dumpster. A bizarre nose emanates from its direction, something like a hiss and a bird-call. A “ _skeeeek”,_ kind of sound. 

_Skeeeeek!_

Thinking it might be an injured animal, Zoro sighs. _Another pet Luffy will want to keep._ He braces himself. 

Behind the unremarkable dumpster is a frightfully skinny child that blinks up at him with wide, owlish eyes. Zoro freezes. The child freezes. 

_(There are always children on the streets.)_

There are _wings_ emerging from the child’s back. Raggedy, patchy grey-brown feathers bristle like fur on an angry cat. The child—a dirty, horribly malnourished thing with cheekbones pronounced like death—opens his mouth. 

_“Skeeeek!”_ The child— _bird—_ says— _chirps_ ? 

The winged-kid hunches over something in their hands protectively. His dirty, gaunt face is completely unreadable, almost expressionless, but there’s something undeniably _fierce_ in those dark eyes. 

_“Skeeeeeeeek,”_ the little boy rumbles, a deeper, more drawn out sound that grates on Zoro’s ears like Nami’s screaming. He shifts a little, turning in a crouch to face Zoro and that’s when he sees it. 

In the child’s hand is a dead rat. 

_He’s eating a dead rat._

Facing Zoro more clearly now, a few more things become immediately clear. The boy’s feet aren’t human. They’re _bird talons_ —a pale pinkish-brownish color with large, black claws. The powerful (and yet so fucking small) bird toes flex in the dirt, braced as if the winged-kid will take off into the air at any moment. There are some feathers speckled down the child’s neck like scales on a fish. Their face is slightly inhuman, features unnaturally sharp and pointed underneath layers of filth and made more exasperated by how hideously underfed the kid is. 

Unthinking, Zoro takes a step forward. 

With a shriek more bird than human, the child _leaps_ up and perches on the edge of the dumpster, its pitiful wings spread out wide and flapping, staring down at him with open terror and anger. 

“Woah, woah,” Zoro holds his hands out, a clear sign of surrender. _What the fuck would Luffy do?_ he thinks, desperate, wishing his Captain was here, given his odd way with animals. 

Zoro can handle kids just fine. Street kids, he’s even better with. But animals? That’s… Luffy’s always been better at that. 

The child is still clutching the rat desperately in his hands, watching Zoro with wary yet strikingly intelligent eyes. 

Zoro swallows. _I am not cut out for this._

“I’m not gonna’ hurt you,” he tries, keeping his voice low. “Are you hungry?” 

The child tilts his head in a move that is _definitely_ more bird than human (although it reminds Zoro abruptly of the face Luffy makes when he’s confused.) 

“Do you understand me?” Zoro tries. The child blinks at him. “You look hungry. I can get you food.” _Fuck,_ the cook would motherfucking _murder him_ if Zoro just let this too-skinny kid, bird or not, run away without getting so much as a real meal. Zoro takes another step forward. 

“No,” the child says. Zoro startles. 

“No?”

“No,” the child repeats. His voice is surprisingly high. He shifts on the edge of the dumpster, talons clicking against the metal. 

“Okay, I… won’t come closer.” Zoro takes a deep breath. He sits down right where he’s standing. He settles in as if he’s about to meditate. 

The child watches him, feathers shifting slightly with each breath, head tilted to the side slightly. He opens his mouth again and _squeaks_ at him. 

“I don’t speak bird. You’ve gotta use words, kid,” Zoro says, as gentle as he can manage. 

“No.” 

“Yes,” Zoro tries. 

“No,” he repeats. 

_This isn’t working._

That’s when he remembers the bento.

When the crew docked this morning and decided to explore the island, Sanji had packed them all _pirate-bentos_ at Luffy’s insistence. The cook had protested that they’re on an inhabited island and that Luffy can just go buy food somewhere if he gets hungry while he explores. Luffy was not happy with that answer and demanded bentos anyways. 

Zoro has _never_ been more grateful for Luffy’s appetite. 

He moves slowly and deliberately as he draws out the small box from his haramaki. The child watches him with rapt eyes. As soon as Zoro sets the bento down and gets the lid open, the kid's entire demeanor changes. 

His eyes open wide like little saucers and he shifts on the dumpster, talons clacking. His wings flutter a little at his sides, like he’s preparing to jump. 

“No?” he speaks after a moment, watching Zoro with obvious suspicion. 

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he assures. 

After another tense few moments, the kid _moves._ All at once, he leaps off the edge of the dumpster, landing on the ground just a few feet away from Zoro and _oh—_

Bare _human_ feet shift in the dirt, taking careful, measured steps closer. Zoro’s eyes snap to the kid’s face in surprise. The features around his neck are gone, leaving only bare skin behind. The features of his face have softened, looking guttingly human and fragile and _this is a child,_ Zoro thinks, something twisting tight in his chest. 

The wings are still there, tucked up close to the kid’s back. His shoulders are hunched as he approaches and he’s breathing fast, clearly terrified to come any closer. 

“You’re a Zoan, then?” The shift between human and bird makes that fairly obvious. The child doesn’t respond or move. He simply watches. 

Zoro takes a thin piece of some fish-looking thing and tosses it gently onto the ground between them. The reaction is instantaneous. The kid _lurches_ for it, desperate hands that are too skinny, even for a child, snatching it up and dropping the slice of meat whole into his mouth. 

Zoro is completely at a loss to describe the sound that comes from the kid’s mouth. A high-pitched trill or warble, almost like the sound a song-bird would make vibrates in the air between them. The kid steps forward. Again. And again. Careful, measured little steps. Shoulders tucked high around their ears, bracing for an attack that won't come. 

_Brave,_ Zoro thinks with a persistent ache, watching the kid shuffle closer and closer. 

He’s standing just in front of Zoro now. Soundlessly, with eyes fixed on Zoro’s own, the child holds out his hands, palms up. 

“No,” he says. 

Zoro drops another piece of fish into their waiting fingers. 

* * *

They’re there for what must be thirty-minutes before the kid allows Zoro to pick him up. He freezes at first, going entirely rigid, and in a heartbeat’s time those human feet transform back into talons, leaving rough, deep scratches streaked down Zoro’s forearms. 

He fights back a wince and holds perfectly still, letting the bird-kid squirm. 

The eyes that search his face are frantic. “No?” the child asks. “No? No?” The little voice _does_ something to Zoro. 

This time, when he gently places a hand on the child’s back, he lets him. _Oh,_ he’s definitely suspicious, but he _lets him._ It’s frightening how little the kid weighs. He weighs less than one of Zoro’s katana, like there’s nothing to him but feathers and claws and desperate little sounds. 

_Bring him to Chopper,_ Zoro resolves. _Bring him to Chopper and to the cook. They’ll know what to do._

“Come on, chicken,” Zoro mumbles, attempting to settle the boy more comfortably in his arms. Again, the talons catch painfully against his skin. This time, it’s impossible to hold back a wince. Sharp like razor-blades, they leave stinging, paper-thin lines across his arms and hands. 

The boy freezes in his arms, watching his face like a hawk. _(The comparison is apt, at least.)_

The bird-feet become human in moments. 

Zoro blinks down at the kid, surprised. The child makes a face at him, something not-quite a smile. He bumps his head against Zoro’s shoulder, finally surrendering (if not quite relaxing) in his hold. 

“Smart chicken,” Zoro says. 

_Bring him to Chopper and to the cook._

They leave the alley behind Frank’s bar together. 

* * *

Sanji swallows. A few things occur to him at once. Firstly, Zoro has somehow acquired a child. (Sanji quickly moves on to the next thing because he absolutely does _not_ have the brain-power to process the _hows_ or _whys_ or _what-evens_ of that particular train of thought.) Secondly, the child is _starving._ At just a glance, Sanji can see it in the child’s gaunt, hollow face and too-sharp features. 

Something swoops low in his stomach, nauseating. (Like a distant, echoing call, he hears the sound of waves beating ceaselessly against the sheer cliff-face of the Rock—the sound that never stopped haunting his worst nightmares.) 

_Don’t think about it._

Third, _wings._ The child has _wings._ They are dirty and matted—a monstrosity of crooked, ragged feathers that just look _wrong._

Fourth, he is begining to hear the whispers around them. 

Zoro found him in the middle of a bustling town square. Sanji had disembarked on an initial search of the island, scouting out the best shops to restock on their provisions before they head off to the next island. (The G8 marine base ransacked Merry’s supplies while they had her, stripping them of most of their perishables. They were lucky to make it to this island in time. Things were getting a little more dire than Sanji was comfortable with. Luffy can only survive on rice and sea-king meat for so long...)

The bustling townspeople have taken an interest in the walking, talking, sentient-plant life with three swords and the bizarre bundle of _child_ and _bird_ in his arms. They’re drawing attention. _Suspicious_ attention. 

“Explain later,” Sanji says, keeping his voice low. “We should get out of the open.” 

Zoro has noticed it too. The man may be a complete idiot, but he isn’t oblivious. People are staring. Talking. Things are bound to go South. 

Zoro nods. The child in his arms shoves a small fist in their mouth and, looking right at Sanji, burbles around it, “No.” 

“Uh—” Sanji stutters, shocked.

“Oh my god,” Zoro manages, shoulders shaking with the effort to hold back laughter. 

“Zoro, _now,”_ Sanji hisses, grabbing the idiot by the arm and dragging him away from the main-street. 

When they’re a little ways away, Zoro hums, “I don’t think he likes you, Cook. Maybe it’s your swirly-eyebrows.” 

Ignoring that (for _now_ ), Sanji continues to march them in the direction of the Merry, never letting go of Zoro’s arm. It would be _ridiculous_ if the man were to get lost now. It’s probably only coincidence at _best_ that Zoro bumped into him. (Besides, the dumbass Marimo is _not_ his priority right now. The starving child—bird?—most certainly is.) 

“What happened?” he asks as they walk.

“Found him outside a bar by the dumpster. Probably a street-kid. He—” Zoro stops, as if unsure what to say next. 

“Marimo?”

“... found him eating a rat.”

( _Waves. Waves hitting the side of the Rock. Looking over the ledge and thinking, would it be worth it? Worth it to jump?)_

“ _Hell,_ Zoro,” Sanji curses. He’s itching for a cigarette but he won’t _dare_ smoke around a child. Bird or not. “And the _wings?”_

“Talons, too. Zoan, I think.” 

“A bird-Zoan?” 

Zoro just shrugs. Apparently, he found a starving orphan bird-Zoan. _What the fuck._

“What the _fuck?”_

“I think we need to see Chopper. Get him some food.”

“No,” the child suddenly cuts in, voice sounding slightly strained. Sanji whirls around and they both stop. “ _No,”_ the boy repeats, a desperate edge rising in his voice. He begins to wiggle, little wings flapping, face scrunched up in an awful look. He outright squawks, catching Zoro in the face with a wing, who in turn _drops_ him. 

“Zoro!” Sanji cries as the boy hits the ground on hands and knees. The boy looks up at Sanji with big, watery eyes. 

Then, he vomits all over Sanji’s shoes. 

* * *

“Oh, shit,” Zoro hisses as Sanji bends down in front of the boy. He feels oddly panicked to see the food from the bento, completely undigested, floating in the boy’s vomit. He keeps making these _awful_ noises—wretches and little cries—wings tucked up tight against his body. 

Sanji’s hands flutter nervously around the boy. “Shh, shh, little _tori-kun,_ shh. Let it out. It’s okay. Shh.” When he settles a gentle hand on the boy’s head, he lets out a guttural little _whine_ and flinches away. Sanji keeps up the rambling, comforting little nothings in a tone that Zoro has _never_ heard from him before, not even to the ladies, not even to _Nami_ when she was sick. 

“You’re alright, little one,” he murmurs. This time, when he reaches for the boy, he doesn’t flinch away. After a moment, Sanji strokes a hand through the child’s dirty, matted hair (as much as one _can_ stroke through hair that’s crusted and tangled together). The boy leans into the touch, going eerily silent. 

“We need to get him to Chopper,” Sanji says in that low, soothing voice. 

“What’s wrong with him?” Zoro gets out. He feels oddly strained. Raw. 

_Out of your fucking depth._

“He ate too much too fast. Victims of starvation can’t handle solid foods right away. Certainly not as much as he had, at least.” 

Guilt is heavy like lead in Zoro’s throat.

“Can you pick him up again? I don’t want to scare him, but we need to get to Chopper as soon as possible. He’ll need an IV and probably something for the nausea. Now that he’s started puking, his body isn’t going to want to stop,” Sanji explains. His face is hidden from Zoro’s eyes by hair. Which is fine. Zoro doesn’t think he can look him in the eye right now, anyways. Not when he's made it worse for this kid. 

_Out of your depth._

When he picks up the boy again, lifting him up and out of Sanji’s touch, the boy makes that same sound—” _Skeeeek!”—_ and lurches out of Zoro’s hands, reaching for the cook. Talons leave fresh slices across his bare arms and his chest as the boy uses him like a spring board, propelling himself off of Zoro’s body and literally _flying_ towards the cook. 

Sanji’s wholly unprepared, his single visible eye blue and shocked, and the boy lands on Sanji’s shoulders. The cook makes a small sound of pain when he lands, surprisingly powerful talons digging into his shoulders for purchase. The little boy hunches over Sanji’s head, his arms tight around him like a strange head-band, wings curling around himself like a little curtain. 

(Zoro ignores the sinking, unexpected hurt in his chest.)

“Okay, okay _tori-kun,_ it’s alright,” he murmurs to the boy (now more _bird_ than boy). To Zoro he says, “Wow, these claws are powerful,” but there’s no real heat to his voice. The boy, eyes fixed on Zoro, whines and presses his face flat into Sanji’s hair, hiding in his own arms. 

Carefully, Sanji reaches both hands up and settles them on the boy's inhuman-ankles in a parody of a shoulder-ride. When he doesn’t protest, Sanji turns his wide, shocked eyes to Zoro. 

“Let’s go,” he urges. 

Zoro swallows. Nods. 

“Don’t get lost, Marimo.” 

* * *

  
  


“Robin-swan!” Sanji calls as soon as he spots the familiar purple hat on the deck of the Merry. _Shit,_ he thinks. _If Robin’s here that means—_

“Oi! Where’s Chopper?” Zoro calls.

They clamber aboard the deck to Robin’s wide-eyed stare. 

“I released Doctor-san from watch a short while ago so that he could explore the island with the others,” Robin says, eyes fixed on the lump of feathers and skinny limbs wrapped around Sanji’s head. He can feel every breath the boy takes, every minute shake and shudder of his feathers. After burying his face in Sanji’s hair and in his own arms, the boy completely withdrew. He hasn’t said a word or made a sound, since.

(Sanji tells himself very firmly that what he’s feeling right now is certainly _not_ anxiety.) 

“Who is this?” Robin asks, her beautiful brow furrowed with concern. “Is anyone injured?” 

“Ah, Robin-chwan is so caring and kind. We found a child in the town. He’s badly malnourished and in need of medical attention,” Sanji answers when it becomes obvious Zoro isn’t going to answer. Loathe as he is to cut his conversation with Robin short, he needs to start working on preparing something suitable for the boy to eat immediately. 

“Oh my,” Robin remarks. “Would you like me to fetch Doctor-san?” 

“That would be lovely, Robin-chwan. Thank you.” He wants to kiss her hands and bow his head to show his gratitude, but. Well. He doesn’t want to disturb their guest. 

With a nod, she’s off. 

“I need to start preparing food that he can safely eat,” Sanji says. “You’ll need to take him.” 

Zoro makes a face. “Because that worked so well last time,” he grumbles. 

Sanji feels a vein throb in his temple. A headache is building. “You idiot, this isn’t a popularity contest!” he shouts. 

The talons gripping his shoulders squeeze down even tighter, widening the existing shallow puncture wounds into something much more serious. Sanji gasps and swallows the instinctive shout of pain that rises in his throat. The arms wrapped around his head tighten and the steady breathing he could feel from the child quickly escalates to hyperventilation. 

_Fuck._

“It’s okay little one,” he tries, rubbing small circles on his ankles (do bird-feet even _have_ ankles?). “I’m sorry, I won’t shout at the marimo-head again.” Fine tremors run through the child. Sanji can’t tell whether it’s out of fear or nausea. “You need to go with Zoro now, _tori-kun._ Maybe he can get you cleaned up?” 

Zoro scrubs a hand rough over his face. He’s probably grinding his teeth together if the set of his jaw is any indication. “I’ll try.” 

It takes some careful coaxing, but they manage to get the boy to go with Zoro. 

“Mmmm,” the little boy hums when he settles. His feet are human again and he’s folded himself, wings and all, into fetal position within Zoro’s arms. The boy stuffs his entire fist into his mouth and sucks on his hand. Then, he looks up at Zoro and _chirps._

Zoro's face twitches—spasms, even. There is something awful about the emotion lingering in the tense lines of his shoulders, in the careful way his arms hold the kid tight to his chest.

Sanji can feel blood from the puncture wounds on his shoulder seeping through his shirt. He starts for the kitchen, rolling his sleeves up as he goes. 

“Try and get him cleaned up,” he suggests.

“Yeah, yeah,” Zoro bites back in a much gentler tone than usual. “What do you keep calling him? _Tori_ -kun?” 

Sanji shrugs. 

Zoro gives the boy in his arms an appraising look. “Huh. Better than calling you “chicken”, I guess. Alright, Tori-kun. Let’s see how you like water.” 

_Tori._

There have been worse names, Sanji thinks.

They go their separate ways, Sanji heading for the kitchen and Zoro going below deck. He’ll need something light but rich in nutrients. Strictly liquids, for now. Suddenly, Sanji wishes he’d tried to remember more from his recovery, after the Rock. As soon as he covers the broth on the stove, he lights up (with hands that _do not shake.)_

The brief reprieve doesn’t last long. Robin returns with Chopper and Nami, who stumble wide-eyed into the galley. The door closes behind them. 

“Sanji? What’s going on? Robin said you and Zoro found a child?” Nami asks. 

“Yes, Nami-swan. Most likely an orphan and some kind of bird-Zoan, as well. He can go from having talons for feet to human feet seemingly at will and he has wings. He’s in bad shape, Chopper,” Sanji explains as quickly as possible. The sooner the kid gets seen by a doctor, the better. 

“ _She,”_ Zoro’s voice cuts through the room like a swing of his swords. He’s standing in the doorway, dripping in water and littered in even more small cuts and scrapes. 

Sanji’s heart drops to his stomach. 

“What?” Nami asks.

“ _She._ The kid’s a girl.” Zoro swallows. “And for the record, she doesn’t like water.” 

The (still-filthy) girl in question pushes past Zoro’s legs and into the room. Somehow, while Zoro is soaking wet, _she’s_ completely dry. Her keen eyes survey Robin, Nami, and Chopper in turn. 

“No,” she says, clear as a bell. Then, she abruptly leans over and vomits on the floor. 


	2. Unknown II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zoro isn’t sure if owls are a type of bird that imprints on humans. He’s only ever heard it said about baby ducks, really. And, if he’s being completely honest, the thought of asking Robin (the only person he can think of that would know) is hideously embarrassing. 
> 
> At any rate, Tori has certainly imprinted on Sanji. 
> 
> (It doesn’t bother him. Not at all.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW, YA'LL. I'm blown away by the number of comments & kudos on the first chapter... Truly, I was so nervous about posting this story for the longest time because I thought no one would be interested at all! It's been sitting in my google drive since May! You guys are amazing and wonderful and I cherish each and every single comment so much. 
> 
> A couple quick notes: the timeline of this story is set after Skypeia and immediately after the G-8 filler arc, before the crew meets the Foxy pirates. I'm probably going to add one more island in before they make it to the Davy Back fight, but then the story will resume following the regular timeline of arcs and it'll be off to Water 7. 
> 
> Additionally, this story is going to attempt to deal pretty heavily with Sanji's and Zoro's childhoods. Now, obviously, Sanji had a pretty Fucked Up run of things and the addition of a heavily traumatized and neglected child to the crew is going to force some things pretty painfully to the forefront for him. I'll add warnings for panic attacks and mentions of abuse as we go, so please ALWAYS CHECK THE NOTES! And, if you ever want more detail before reading, please hit me up on tumblr. As for Zoro, since he really doesn't have much of a canonical background besides Kuina and the dojo, I'm going to be playing fast and loose with canon. Buckle up, I guess is what I'm trying to say. 
> 
> Love ya'll and happy reading!
> 
> ***TW: panic attacks, referenced physical abuse of a child***

Chopper takes control of the situation immediately. Every inch of him becomes the competent doctor that Zoro knows him to be in crisis situations. It’s decided immediately that cleaning her up is going to have to take a back-seat to getting some fluids in her. When Chopper announces that the signs of dehydration are clear, Zoro feels (perhaps for the first time in his life) like he really  _ is  _ kind of an idiot. 

_ Well, she’s here now.  _

Dazed from throwing up again (all bile, this time) it takes the little girl a moment to register that there is a reindeer-doctor examining her. Hilariously, Chopper is just a little bit taller than she is, if not exactly the same height. 

_ She must be so young. Or so malnourished.  _

With an inhuman shriek, she launches herself clumsily into the air where she bumps against the ceiling.  _ Hard.  _ She recovers, keeping herself aloft with powerful, frantic beats of her wings, and lands on Zoro’s shoulders much like she had the cook’s. Her talons are like  _ razors  _ where they dig into his shoulders and her hands twist tightly up in his hair.

She then proceeds to  _ shriek  _ once, very loudly, at a watery-eyed Chopper. 

“Chopper, can you understand her?” Nami asks. She has a hand pressed over her own mouth and looks shocked and a bit horrified. 

Chopper frowns. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he says to the little girl. To Nami, he replies, “It’s difficult. She’s not so much  _ speaking  _ as she is making sound. It’s… she’s not really talking? More like warning me to stay away.” 

“Oi.” Zoro tries reaching for her only to have her  _ bite  _ his  _ hand.  _

“Zoro!” Chopper and Nami cry in unison. 

_ “No,”  _ she says. 

“‘No?’” Nami repeats, baffled. “Do you know what we’re saying, honey?” 

She doesn’t respond. It’s not like she bit him  _ hard.  _ She was just warning him, probably.  _ Don’t touch.  _ Maybe:  _ I’m scared.  _

She doesn’t respond to Nami. In fact, she stays firmly rooted on Zoro’s shoulders even as Chopper makes it very clear that he  _ really needs  _ to do a proper examination. 

“Tori,” Zoro starts, keeping his voice low and calm. “He’s going to help. Chopper isn’t going to hurt you. Please.” 

He feels a little odd, calling her  _ bird,  _ but it’s better than just  _ kid  _ or  _ girl.  _ At least “tori” makes more of a name than “girl” does. 

“No,” she says. But, after a few tense moments, of staring and fluttering and a rattling rumble of sound in her chest, she very slowly and very carefully starts to climb down Zoro’s back and onto the floor. He tries to hold still and not wince with every snag and tug of her hands and claws at his skin. Her feet touch the floor with barely a sound and she peeks out at Chopper from between Zoro’s legs, hands bunched up in the fabric of his pants. 

“No?” Tori asks. Then, she spots Sanji and  _ bolts.  _

Lead returns to his gut and something acrid tasting rises in Zoro’s throat when she breaks away from him.  _ Stop it,  _ he thinks.  _ Stop.  _

(Zoro  _ really  _ needs to get a handle on this feeling. It’s not doing anybody any good.)

She rams into Sanji’s legs, but Zoro knows first-hand that she weighs barely anything. The cook, predictably, doesn’t even sway. Tori smashes her face into Sanji’s knees and wraps her arms as far around both of his legs as she can get them. His hand goes immediately to the top of her head, much like he touches Chopper when the little doctor needs reassurance. 

“It’s alright, Tori-chwan. Everyone just wants to help.” 

She clearly disagrees if the angry way she chatters at the room is anything to go by. 

Chopper frowns. “It’s… she  _ really _ isn’t talking, just making noise but I think I can understand generally what she’s trying to say? I’m sorry, everyone, it’s really hard to make sense of.” 

Robin places a gentle hand on Chopper’s hat. “You’re doing wonderfully, Doctor-san.” 

Chopper mumbles, “That doesn’t make me happy, you bastard!” He seems to consider the assembled group for a moment. “Alright! Zoro, can you take the patient to the infirmary? Sanji, I’ll need a light broth for her within the next few hours. She shouldn’t do solids for a while yet, but she needs to eat. Someone should go find Luffy?” He tacks on, almost as an afterthought. “Or maybe her parents?” 

“I don’t think she has any, Chopper,” Zoro says. 

Chopper frowns. “Alright. Luffy, then.” 

“I’ll go,” Nami offers. “He and Usopp are probably causing trouble somewhere anyhow.”

“I’ll have it done, Chopper,” Sanji chimes in. 

“I’m going to do some research and see if I can pinpoint which devil fruit Tori-san has. The coloration of her wings alone should be enough of a starting place,” Robin offers. 

* * *

Getting Tori to let go of Sanji is… 

_ Not great.  _

* * *

_ Gutted.  _ Sanji slowly stirs the broth on the stove, adding a few changes to the recipe here and there. If there is a word for how he feels right now it is  _ gutted.  _

( _ Waves, crashing against the sheer cliff face—)  _

Tori fought them  _ hard  _ when Zoro and Chopper tried to take her to the exam room. In the end, Chopper had needed to  _ sedate  _ her. Never once had she cried. She had only screamed. 

(His own emaciated face had looked so foreign to him in the mirror,  _ After _ . He had taken to eating as fast as he could, afraid that food would be taken away or simply up and disappear on him without warning. The nausea and cramping and nightmares and the weakness of his own demolished body—)

Sanji cuts those thoughts off as harshly as he can manage. 

Tori’s unconscious form was as light as a feather. 

Far too light, even for a bird. 

* * *

She looks incredibly small on the infirmary bed. The IV in her arm doesn’t belong there. The hospital gown Chopper had provided makes Zoro’s stomach turn with an equal intensity. She is so very small.

Underneath all the dirt and grime her skin is sun-darkened and dotted with freckles. Halfway through sedating her and bringing her to the infirmary, she had unconsciously shifted into a fully-human form, her wings gone, her curly and matted brown hair a wild mess. A part of himself that Zoro doesn’t quite understand is hurting. He aches for her. 

She’s so fucking  _ small.  _

There are thick calluses on her hands and the soles of her feet and silvery scars on her arms and legs—a testament to a life lived entirely on the streets. Zoro’s arms looked all too similar when he was young—in a time before the dojo. 

_ Why does it hurt so much?  _ A part of him wants to hold her little hand. Offer comfort. Zoro squashes it down. He hovers instead. 

He’s interacted with kids off the street more times than he can count. Every inhabited place he’s been—East Blue or Grand Line—has them. Hell, even Skypiea had its fair share of dirty-faced, wide-eyed strays hiding in the forests and among the Shandians. (Their little wings can’t be compared to Tori’s. Zoro can’t really imagine any of those kids flying like she had—a wild thing, more bird than human.) 

Maybe it’s because he held her. Maybe it’s because he watched her violently vomit the food he had given her. Maybe it’s because she’s so…

_ Tiny.  _

Chopper finishes examining her mouth. (Why Chopper was peering so intently into her mouth, Zoro has no idea.) His expression is grim as he straightens. 

“I’d estimate she’s about five or six-years old,” he says. 

Zoro’s stomach drops into his feet. 

He wants to hit something until it stops moving. He doesn’t know what to do with the sorrow and the anger inside of him. He’s never felt it outside of a battle. It rattles through his bones like adrenaline. 

Zoro hopes Chopper isn’t expecting a comment from him on that. He’s not quite sure that if he opens his mouth, he can stop himself from screaming. 

_ What five-year old can only say ‘no’? What must she have been through for that to be the only word she needed?  _

Desperately,  _ childishly,  _ Zoro wishes for Luffy. 

_ I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.  _

With a sigh, he pulls up a chair. There’s nowhere else he needs to be. 

* * *

She metabolizes through whatever drugs Chopper gave her  _ fast.  _ Sanji is taking the broth up to the infirmary when he suddenly hears a crash and shouting. 

He breaks into a sprint, rushing towards the little room. Adrenaline spiking, Sanji bursts in just in time to see a terrified Tori rip the IV straight out of her arm with a shriek. 

“Zoro! Hold her!” Chopper cries. There’s a deep slash on Zoro’s cheek. Her talons are out, but surprisingly not her wings. She’s eerily silent. 

“Tori-chan!” Sanji exclaims, dropping the tray of soup down onto Chopper’s desk. Her eyes snap to his, searching. “It’s alright. Please. It’s alright.” Her head tilts at an odd angle as she stares him down. Like a predator, she rolls her neck in the other direction, assessing. Slowly, like flower petals unfurling, her ratty-looking brown speckled wings unfurl from her back, feathers shaking. 

No one in the room so much as breathes. 

_ Fuck it.  _

Sanji holds his arms out, palms up. “You’re safe,” he murmurs in the softest voice he has. 

Tori  _ lunges.  _

He braces himself for the sharp pain of her claws but instead, human feet crash into his chest, little arms thrown tight around his neck like a vice. She hits him all at once, clinging  _ desperately,  _ wings quivering. The strength in those powerful things blows his hair back and out of his face for just a moment. Tori presses her own face tight against his neck where his high collar meets his skin and Sanji can feel that her eyes are squeezed shut. That she’s shaking. 

The wave of emotion that overtakes him is like a drug. 

Sanji holds her as tightly as he dares. 

“You’re alright,” he manages, among other nonsense platitudes. 

“No,” Tori says with feeling. 

Chopper’s pressing his hooves against his mouth, big tears welling up in his eyes. Zoro is frozen as rigid as a statue, eyes locked onto Sanji’s own. 

He’s never been great at reading the swordsman. Honestly, Zoro has always seemed to have three very clear “modes”: bloodthirsty, irritated, or bored. (And sometimes, drunk and giggly.) But the expression on Zoro’s face is unmistakable. 

It’s the clearest loo of  _ “what the fuck do we do”  _ Sanji has ever seen. 

Truthfully, Zoro looks  _ gutted.  _

“Chopper,” Sanji starts, finding that his voice is a little too much of a croak for his liking. “What do you need me to do?” 

Chopper wipes at his eyes, gathering himself. “Right. Well, I’ll need to get a new IV going. It… it might help to have you here. Could you sit on the bed, please? Zoro, could you give me an extra pair of hands?”

Zoro grunts an affirmative. (It’s brutish, but Sanji doesn’t quite have the energy to call him on it. Not like this.) 

Tori whines high in her throat as he moves back to the bed, hands clenching and tugging hard on the collar of his shirt. He doesn’t need her to speak to know what she’s trying to say:  _ Distress. Why? Help.  _

Swallowing against the lump in his throat, Sanji gingerly sits at the edge of the cot and strokes a gentle hand through her matted hair. 

(His mother did it for him, once upon a time.)

“Shh, little bird. No one will hurt you. You’re safe here,” he whispers. She clings to him tight enough to bruise. (At least the talons aren’t in-play at the moment. That’s gotta count for something.) 

After a moment, Chopper draws near, Zoro following with a silver tray of medical supplies in his hand. Tori sees the needle clasped in Chopper’s hooves. And then she begins to cry. 

“Oh, darling. It’s alright, I swear. I promise. It’s alright,” Sanji whispers. His heart  _ twists  _ in his chest— _ fuck,  _ she’s so  _ small.  _ So, so small and so afraid and it isn’t  _ right.  _ He rocks her, swaying back and forth while she cries, silent save for the unavoidable ragged hitches in her breathing. Somehow, the quiet, stifled weeping is  _ worse  _ than openly crying would be. “We’re going to help you, I promise. Little bird, I  _ promise.”  _

“Tori-chan?” Chopper asks. Sanji feels her shift against his neck, peeking out at Chopper with what must be the most heartbreaking eyes. She’s responding to him, though. Which is.  _ Something.  _

“Tori-chan, we’re going to help you. You’re sick.” He holds out the needle in his hoof, still caped. “This will help you get better. This will help you. I know it’s scary.” 

A warbling trill rumbles in her chest. 

“I know you’re scared,” Chopper says. “We just want to help you. Let us help you, please, Tori-chan.” 

She makes the same sound again and  _ holy shit,  _ are they  _ talking?  _

“I know. Would you like to drink something? Drink? Food?”

“Chopper, are you…?” Zoro asks, his voice soft. 

The little reindeer furrows his brow. “The intent is there, in her sounds. But. It’s not any kind of language that makes sense. It’s like she’s got all these sounds she can make but she’s… not using them in ways that make sense. If I had to translate… she’s saying…” Chopper swallows. “Something like ‘please, don’t. Please. No hurt.’” 

The silence is deafening. 

_ Oh, little one.  _

Tori makes another sound, a breathy and drawn-out  _ “peep-ing”  _ sort of noise. 

“‘Help’,” Chopper supplies. His voice is thick with emotion. 

_ “Peeeeep,”  _ Tori says. 

“‘Help’,” Chopper repeats. 

_ “Peeeep.”  _

And again, “‘Help.’”

Her tears subside.  _ “Peeeep.”  _ A very intense, thoughtful look settles on her face.

“‘Help.’”

“H-ep.” 

“Holy  _ shit,”  _ Sanji breathes. 

“H-eeep,” Tori says. “H-ep?” 

“‘Help’, yes. We’re going to help you, Tori-chan,” Chopper promises, tears spilling over and out of his eyes. His hooves are shaking. 

A small hand touches the side of Sanji’s face, impossibly gentle. Tori stares up at him with wide, imploring eyes. 

“No. H-ep,” she says. “Help,” she enunciates stronger, after a beat. 

“Help, yes. We’re going to help you, little bird.” The effort it takes to keep his voice from breaking is enough to re-break his back. He combs her hair out of her face as best as he can. 

Sanji looks up at Zoro to find that he’s already staring at him. 

_ Gutted.  _

* * *

Eventually, the IV goes back in. They all suffer some more slashes for it, but they’re minor. It’s nothing compared to the fear that leaks off of the girl in waves.  _ Nothing _ compared to the desperation with which she clings to Sanji and reaches for Zoro with  _ no  _ on her tongue. Undoubtedly exhausted by the struggle and stress, Tori drops off into a fitful sleep, still firmly rooted in Sanji’s lap.

Chopper flops into his chair with a weary sigh. Zoro is content to drop straight down onto the floor, his back against the wall. 

As he gathers himself, Zoro’s eyes never stray from Tori or the man that’s holding him.

Sometime during the struggle, Sanji lost his suit jacket. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, boasting small red scratches that no doubt sting just as much as Zoro’s own do. Her little face is pressed flat against Sanji’s shirt, smears of dirt and grime and tears and snot soiling the front of it. Even in sleep, her hands are bunched in a tight grip on his shirt. Sanji’s hands support her head and her back and Tori is so small that his grip seems to dwarf her. 

(Zoro thinks with a kind of delirious clarity that the two of them look so much like a mother holding a baby—the most natural, instinctive thing in the world.) 

No one speaks for a long stretch of time. The sun is getting low on the horizon, casting orange light across the floorboards. 

“Marimo,” Sanji says. His voice is considerably subdued. “I need to have dinner at least  _ started  _ before Luffy gets here. Switch with me.” 

Anger bubbles up hot in his throat. 

“Don’t you think there are more important things going on right now than  _ dinner,  _ you shithead?” Zoro growls. 

Tori feels  _ safe,  _ with Sanji. When she vomited, she went to  _ him.  _ In the kitchen, startled by Chopper, she raced to  _ him.  _ This whole time, she’s clung to  _ him  _ for comfort. But as soon as she’s asleep, the cook is eager to  _ leave?  _

Zoro wants to hit something. Preferably the cook’s stupid fucking face. 

“And do  _ you  _ seriously think that having the shitty captain come back and scream about food at the top of his lungs  _ won’t  _ scare the shit out of her?” Sanji hisses, the tips of his ears flushed red. 

_ She doesn’t want me,  _ rises to his tongue and Zoro swallows the words with considerable effort.  _ She wants you.  _

“Sanji’s right, Zoro,” Chopper says after a considerably tense pause. “Luffy might be too overwhelming right now.” 

_ But she doesn’t want me.  _

“Whatever.”

They manage to trade places without waking her. If Sanji catches an elbow to the gut, well. It’s just a happy accident. 

* * *

An ear-splitting yell rings out across the harbor in Luffy’s unmistakable voice.  _ “MARINES!”  _

_ Oh thank god,  _ Sanji thinks.  _ I really need to kick something.  _

Across the harbor, gunning for the Merry, are Luffy, Usopp, and Nami. 

“Chopper! Raise the anchor!” Nami shouts as they draw close. 

Behind them, just on the horizon, come a squad of marines, firing shot after shot. With a shout and a fearful little,  _ “We’re gonna die!”  _ Chopper transforms into his heavy-point form and rushes for the anchor. 

Just as Luffy flings a shrieking Nami and Usopp onto the deck, Robin calls out, “Three ships approaching!” Each marine ship proudly boasts  _ G8  _ on their sails. 

Their luck has run out. G8 has caught up to them. 

* * *

Zoro sends the very last Marine that managed to jump aboard the Merry tumbling into the water with a spray of blood. 

“Oh my  _ god,”  _ Nami pants, sprawled out face-up on the deck. Sweat covers her face, her short hair sticking to her skin. “I can’t believe we got away. They were  _ right there.”  _ She covers her face with her hands and screams into them, an exhausted release of stress and frustration. 

Luffy, unperturbed as ever, wraps his rubbery arms around Zoro’s waist, bouncing against his back. 

“That was fun!” He announces. “Zoro didn’t even need to use three-sword style!” 

Sweaty and antsy, Zoro shrugs the idiot off, dumping him on the deck. 

“Chopper, can you give me a hand? Merry’s railing was damaged from that last barrage of cannon-fire,” Usopp calls out. His tools are already in his hands. A few nails stick out of the corner of his mouth. 

The irritating scent of smoke hits Zoro’s lungs. With a grunt, he turns to find the cook standing close by, lighting up. Zoro barely resists the urge to snatch the thing out of his hand and throw it overboard, just to start a fight. The battle with the marines was  _ hardly  _ satisfying. Adrenaline and anger light him up from the inside-out and Zoro  _ itches  _ to sink his blades into  _ something.  _

“I took out more than you,” he blurts. 

Sanji gives him a withering look through his wind-tossed hair. “Sure you did, shithead.” He takes a long drag and blows the smoke out of his nose like a stupid curly-browed dragon. 

_ God, he’s such an asshole.  _

“Fuck you,” Zoro snarls. 

“What the hell got your panties in a twist, Moss-for-brains?” Sanji bristles, swinging a kick at Zoro’s knees. 

The dull side of a sword rings out against the reinforced sole of Sanji’s stupid, fancy-pants shoes. 

“ _ You,”  _ he grunts. 

“Oh no,  _ Tori-chan!”  _ Chopper cries.

Everything stops. Zoro’s heart has never dropped into his stomach so fast. He shouldn’t have left her sleeping alone to help with the Marines. He shouldn’t have been so stupid. Is she hurt—?

_ “Woooaaahhh!”  _ Luffy cries.

Tori stands alert in the open doorway to the infirmary. The thin medical gown Chopper provided whips around her small limbs with the strong ocean breeze. She looks just as she did when Zoro first found her—the features of her face exceptionally bird-like, little downy feathers on either side of her neck, some on her cheeks, wings held rigid behind her back. 

Luffy races towards her, a huge smile on his face. 

Before he can even get close, Tori lets out a loud, indignant squawk and takes off into the air, perching on the railing of the upper-deck, seemingly out of Luffy’s reach. 

“Who is  _ that?”  _ Luffy breathes, rocking back and forth on his heels in giddy excitement. 

“Shitty rubber,” Sanji growls, yanking Luffy away from the stairs by the back of his shirt and keeping him there with a firm grip. “This is the kid that Zoro found.” 

“Amazing!” Luffy marvels. “Sanji, he’s a  _ bird.”  _

“The Fuku-Fuku-no-mi,” Robin remarks. “ _She_ is an  _ owl- _ human, Captain-san.” 

Tori tilts her head at them. “No. Help,” she says, clear as day. 

“Sanji! I want chicken!” Luffy shouts. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you, you shitty-idiot!” Sanji shouts. He kicks Luffy into the mast, Merry's worn wood shuddering with the impact. 

Tori shuffles side to side on the railing, peering down at the assembled crew with wary eyes. 

“It’s alright,  _ Tori-san,”  _ Robin says, smiling. “No one is going to eat you.” 

Silently, Tori moves her lips in odd shapes. She touches her own mouth with gentle hands. Frowns. Moves her mouth again, silent. 

“What’s she doing, Chopper?” Zoro finds himself asking. He doesn’t approach, despite how much his body seems to want to.  _ Better to let Sanji handle it.  _

_ (She doesn’t want you.) _

“I’m not sure,” he answers. 

With no warning, Tori leaps into the air, swooping down to land on the deck in front of Sanji. Usopp yelps at the sudden movement, shuffling backwards across the deck. 

“Oh my god, is she going to eat Sanji?” he breathes, sweating. 

“Shut the hell up, Usopp,” Sanji says with no real heat. Gingerly, he touches the top of Tori’s head. She grips Sanji’s arm with both hands and then proceeds to  _ climb him  _ like he’s a living  _ jungle gym.  _

There’s a bizarre kind of grace to it, even though there’s a ridiculous kind of comedy there, too. The sight of a child swinging and climbing her way up the cook like a monkey in the trees... it's not unlike the way Luffy scrabbles all over anyone that holds still long enough to let him. 

The whole crew holds perfectly still. Tori, with a look of intense concentration, places a hand over Sanji’s mouth. She moves her own, silent. Touches his mouth insistently but gently. Zoro’s stomach swoops. Sanji’s eyes are as wide as dinner plates.

“Tori-chan?” Sanji speaks through her hand, voice gentle as the wind. 

“ _ Orrrreeee… Ch-an,”  _ Tori parrots. 

An awed silence hangs over the ship. 

“Uh, guys?” Usopp starts. “I hate to ruin the moment, but. Did we just kidnap a kid from that island?” 

* * *

The shitty captain is far too flippant about the whole thing. At dinner, Tori perches on Sanji’s shoulders, hunched over his head, and follows the conversation with rapt eyes. 

“I like her!” Luffy announces, as if this solves any of their problems. 

“Luffy, she’s a child,” Nami begins. “We’ll need to take her somewhere safe.”

“Why can’t she stay here?” Luffy asks between giant bites of his meal. 

Nami splutters. “It’s  _ dangerous,  _ Luffy!” 

He shrugs. “I lived with mountain-bandits when I was little,” Luffy replies. Again, as if that statement solves  _ anything.  _

“Wait, hold on, why are we  _ not  _ taking her back home?” Usopp interrupts. “Do I need to remind you guys that we  _ took  _ a  _ child?”  _

“No,” Zoro utters. It’s the first time he’s spoken since they sat down for dinner. His voice is reminiscent of steel, wholly unwavering. “She’s not going back there.” 

“What?!” Usopp squeaks. “Why not?” 

“Because no one there wants her,” he says. The look in his eyes is not one that Sanji knows. He’s distant. Still. His hands are clenched into fists where they rest on the table. (If he hits the table, Sanji will kick him right in his stupid, pensive face, no matter how much he happens to agree with what the moss is saying.) 

“I found her eating a rat in a dumpster, Usopp. The only thing she’s said since we found her is ‘no’ and ‘help’. She’s not going back there. There's nothing good waiting for her.” 

A weighty silence hangs over the crew like a shroud. 

“Well, she can’t stay here,” Nami says softly after a moment. 

Something twists in Sanji’s chest.  _ (Waves crash against the cliff. Loneliness gnaws at his insides like stomach acid. He sees his mom. His siblings, too, even though he knows they aren’t really his siblings anymore, even though he knows they never loved him, never even cared for him. They’re not there. No one is. No one—)  _

“We can’t just leave her somewhere,” he says. 

“‘ome-hair,” Tori mimics. “S-ome hair. W-here.” 

“Yosh!” Luffy stands. “Tori stays for now! As long as she’s okay with it.” 

Tori’s little hands pull gently at Sanji’s hair, combing through it, smoothing it down, picking it up, dropping it again… She’s undeniably occupied with it.

“-if it,” she repeats. “S-ome hair. ‘F it. It. Help.” 

Robin smiles behind her teacup. “Sounds like an agreement if I’ve ever heard one, Captain-san.” 

* * *

Zoro isn’t sure if owls are a type of bird that imprints on humans. He’s only ever heard it said about baby ducks, really. And, if he’s being completely honest, the thought of asking Robin (the only person he can think of that would know) is hideously embarrassing. 

At any rate, Tori has certainly imprinted on Sanji. 

(It doesn’t bother him.  _ Not at all.) _

“Can you pass me a potato, please?” Sanji asks in the quiet mid-morning hours between breakfast and lunch. 

“Pass me a potato, please?” Tori chirps dutifully. She thoughtfully considers all the vegetables in the strainer before handing Sanji a carrot. 

“Close,” Sanji hums. He pauses, setting down his knife, and plucks a potato out of the colander. “This is a potato,” he says. 

Tori taps it once. “Potato.” 

“Exactly.” 

It’s been about a week since they fled that stupid island. (Zoro never got its name and doesn’t care enough to ask.) In that time, Tori and the damn cook become attached at the hip. She’s a little imprinted duckling if Zoro has ever seen one. In fact, Tori has only shown an affinity over the last week for three things. 

The first thing is the shitty cook. Wherever he goes, she follows—either perched on his shoulders or weaving between his legs while he walks. (Amazingly, Sanji never once trips over her. It’s almost like a game between them—he carries drinks to Nami and Robin while Tori rushes and weaves around his feet like a hyperactive dog, all the while Sanji never breaks stride, never kicks her, never steps on her, never trips. Effortlessly graceful. It’s  _ infuriating _ .) 

At night, she follows the cook into the mens' bunk and climbs up on top of the lockers. This is where she sleeps with a stolen collection of various shirts, towels, and other soft-things, no matter how many times the crew attempts to urge her to sleep with the girls in a real bed. In the morning, when Sanji rises at the ass-crack of dawn to begin breakfast, Tori rises with him, padding sleepily after him up the ladder. 

The second thing Tori shows any kind of preference for is  _ high places.  _ Sanji can be heard gently shooing her off of the countertops in the Merry’s kitchen just as often as he can be heard pitifully swooning after Nami and Robin. Tori perches on the counter, on top of the boys’ lockers, on top of the fridge, and on the backs of chairs. She sits on the upper-most rails of the deck when Sanji delivers snacks to the crew, and, on the rare occasion that she is not glued to his side, she can be found perched on the very top of the crow’s nest. (Once or twice, Zoro has seen her sitting beside Luffy at his special spot.) 

And the third and final thing?

“Another potato, please, Tori-chwan?”

“Another potato, please,” she dutifully repeats, this time passing him the correct vegetable. 

Tori has developed an affinity for repeating  _ everything _ anyone says. 

The upside of this is that she’s very quickly learning how to communicate—although she keeps her own comments extremely brief and even monosyllabic when possible. The downside?

It’s annoying as  _ fuck.  _

“Cook. Booze,” Zoro grunts, dropping his sweat-soaked towel on the table. 

“Cook. Booze,” Tori chirps. 

Sanji whirls around to snap at him, fuming. “Marimo, you absolute  _ brute.  _ Can you, for  _ once,  _ adopt a single fucking manner?” 

“Single fucking manner.” Tori takes advantage of the cook’s moment of distraction to steal a diced cube of raw potato and pops it into her mouth. “Ma-ri-mo,” she adds, chewing. Disgusted, she pulls a face. Swallows the potato anyways. 

The shitty cook doesn’t even notice. 

“And get your disgusting towel off the table, you damn meat-head!” He snaps, gesticulating with the knife in his hand. 

“Damn meat-head,” Tori responds. She takes a little hop, batting her wings and landing on her hands and knees on the counter. 

“Not on the counter, Princess,” Sanji corrects. There is infinite, gentle patience in his voice. 

Zoro rolls his eyes as high as they can go into his head. 

“‘Princess’? Really?” he mocks. 

“Princess really!” Tori leaps off of the counter at Sanji’s word.

Curiously, Sanji’s cheeks flush pink.  _ Embarrassed. _

“Shut up,” the cook hisses, punctuating himself with a forceful chop on the cutting board. 

“Shut up. Shut up.” Tori carefully approaches Zoro, still seated at the table and still  _ waiting for his fucking drink.  _

She tilts her head in a painfully bird-like motion. Her face contorts into a comically exaggerated frown. Her messy nest of brown, curly hair bobs with the motion.

“What doing?” she asks him, pointed. 

It’s the first and only time she’s addressed him directly. The only other person she speaks to (and doesn’t just repeat) has unsurprisingly been Chopper. (The little doctor had burst into delighted tears when, over breakfast, Tori had shoved a muffin into his hands and announced, “you help me”.) 

“‘What  _ are you _ doing’, Tori-chan,” Sanji corrects. 

“What  _ are you _ doing?” she asks. She glares skeptically at him. 

_ Great. Guess the cook is really rubbing off on her. Fan-fucking-tastic.  _

“Thirsty,” Zoro supplies. 

Tori considers him for a moment more. 

“Yes,” she concludes. Then, she walks away. 

The cook just about  _ pisses  _ himself laughing.  _ Assholes. Both of them.  _

* * *

Something small hits the deck with a  _ thud  _ at his feet. “Ma-ri-mo.” 

Zoro opens one eye. 

Tori stands in front of him, mostly-human with only her wings out. She gazes at him expectantly, but otherwise with a blank face. Zoro looks down. 

There is a dead rat at his feet. 

Tori points at it. “Yours,” she tells him. 

“Uh—no?” Zoro tries. The animal’s neck has been pierced expertly by claws. She must have found it somewhere on the ship. 

“ _ Yours,”  _ she points at it forcefully, frowning. "For _you."_

Nami rounds the corner and shrieks. “Oh god, that’s disgusting! Tori!” 

The effect is instantaneous. Tori  _ flinches  _ backwards, tripping over her own feet and hitting the deck with a  _ thud.  _ Her eyes are wide and fearful. (Something primal and protective flares inside of him.) Zoro lurches to his feet. 

“Zoro! Did you encourage this? It’s horrible!” Nami wails, stalking towards him. 

“What? No!” He shouts back, trying to get a clear line of sight to Tori beyond Nami’s irate form. 

“How did we even end up with rats anyways?!” The witch turns to shout towards the galley, “Sanji-kun!” She turns back to Zoro. “Well! Throw it overboard already! It’s probably got diseases!”

_ (Yours.)  _

“Don’t tell me what to do, you damn sea-witch!” 

In a move that is entirely familiar to him, Nami raises her fist to strike him upside the head for calling her a witch. 

_ “No!”  _

Tori  _ throws  _ herself in between them, arms spread out wide, chest heaving. (She barely comes up above Zoro’s knees and yet...)

Nami’s hand drops like she’s been burned. She takes a staggering step backwards, eyes wide. Blinks at Zoro with an open expression of horror. 

“I—” she starts just as Sanji comes bounding up the stairs. 

“Nami-swan…?” he slows as he takes in the scene, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. 

Luffy rockets himself up the stairs, hot on Sanji’s heels. Usopp and Chopper clamber u behind him as loudly as a pair of elephants, probably summoned by all the shouting. Each additional person that arrives makes Tori take a step back until she’s nearly pressed against Zoro’s legs. 

She shakes head to toe with tremors. 

“Tori-san,” Robin says as she comes to stand behind Nami. “I believe Navigator-san was just—”

“No.” She makes a low, rhythmic clicking, deep in her throat. Feathers blossom into life beginning in her cheeks, trailing down the sides of her neck and her arms while her wings unfurl fully outstretched behind her arms. 

_ Fuck.  _

Zoro touches her, gently on the shoulder. It is clearly the wrong move to have made. 

She yelps as if struck, stumbling blindly away from him with a powerful flinch. With a naked expression of betrayal, Tori gapes at him. Her eyes are dilated in clear and complete terror. Little naked sounds of quick and labored breath race past her lips. She clutches protectively at her own shoulders, gripping so hard that her skin turns sheet-white. 

“Tori-chan, it’s alright,” Sanji assures her, stepping in close. In one fluid motion, he crouches to her height and reaches out a hand for her. Simultaneously, he plucks the lit cigarette from his lips. 

Tori stops  _ breathing.  _

_ “Sanji—!”  _ Chopper shouts, but it’s too late. 

She takes to the sky like a rocket. 

* * *

“Tori!” Half the crew shouts at once, racing to the spot where she just was. Sanji’s heart pounds in his ears—the only thing he can hear.  __

“Shit!” Zoro shouts. “Where is she—?” 

High up in the sky, Tori’s form shrinks smaller and smaller. Running. 

_ From him.  _

_ (When his mother dies, the only hands that reach for him reach to hurt.)  _

“I’m so sorry, I should have said something sooner,” Chopper babbles, tears rolling down his cheeks. “I couldn’t confirm the marks but I should have said something anyways and now—”

“Doctor-san, what do you mean?” Robin asks him. (Sanji isn’t sure he has the words, right now.) 

_ (Niji derives the most pleasure from punching him—over and over and over again until his eyes blacken and his vision swims and the only thing he can hear is—) _

His own heartbeat drums like a death knell. 

“Do you mean—?” Zoro begins. 

Voices cut in and out. 

“—burn marks on her shoulders—” Chopper. 

_ (Sanji tears himself out of his brothers’ hands, knowing he can’t outrun them but needing to try anyways—)  _

“—all those scars—?” Nami-swan.

“—signs of physical abuse—”

“—not just neglect?” 

“—so Sanji-kun’s cigarette—?”

He can’t look away from the clouds, her already small form shrinking to be just a dot, rapidly fading against a background of blue.

“I’ll get her—” Luffy.

“No, Luffy, stop!” Chopper. 

“—we just let her go?!” Usopp. 

“—can’t fly forever—”

_ (Can’t run forever— _ the smell of the dungeon haunts him; how could he have ever forgotten? The rot and the rats and the ghost of his mother’s perfume on his clothes until it disappeared altogether…  _ How could he have ever forgotten?)  _

_... _

Sanji comes back to himself in fragments of sensation. 

It’s pleasantly cool outside. Perhaps even a little cold with the steady ocean breeze. Sound returns in full—the crew frantic and shocked. Vision. He can’t see her anymore. Not even as a speck in the sky. The smell of his own cigarettes, thick and heavy with guilt. 

Sanji swallows. “Chopper. What do we do?” he asks. 

“I—I don’t know,” he admits. “I’m. Not that kind of doctor…” 

Luffy flops down, cross-legged on the deck. “We wait,” he says. 


	3. Wywath Island

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a child in his arms—a child that is not his and that is not him, but one that has suffered so similarly—and he needs to see her safe, happy, and unharmed as much as he needs to fucking breathe. Sanji doesn’t quite understand why. Maybe it is his own childhood spent unwanted, unloved, and accruing bruises until, eventually, the starving was as literal as it was figurative. Maybe it is some primal parental instinct he didn’t know he had—(it’s not like Sanji ever spent a good deal of time around children before). Maybe it’s just unavoidable with her big, brown eyes, fluffy speckled feathers, and penchant for snatching up new words like other children snatch up interesting bugs or lizards. 
> 
> But the truth of it is that Sanji is attached. And not only that, his attachment is pulling his darkest, most shameful nightmares straight to the surface. (His attachment is going to rip him apart.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three chapters? In three days? Am I on cocaine?  
> (I don't think so, but it could be possible.)
> 
> All of your comments bring me so much joy. I also want to say that I give my BLANKET PERMISSION to create fanart for this fic. I am so fucking flattered that some of you asked, holy shit????? This goes for any story of mine, just shoot me a picture of it on tumblr, cause I'll wanna see it (and share it) when you're done! 
> 
> FUN FACT: My inspiration for Tori's feather patterns come from the Balsas Screech-owl. They are very delightful.
> 
> ***TW: references to past child abuse***

A few minutes into the crew’s silent vigil, Robin calmly suggests that perhaps not all of them need to be crowded around on the deck waiting for the skittish girl to return. In fact, it is probably counterproductive to their intention of calming her down and making her feel safe enough  _ to  _ return.  _ (If she even does,  _ a terrible, weak little part of Zoro hisses.)

At Robin's advice, the cook is quick to rush to the crow’s nest, claiming something about higher ground and better sight. Only Luffy and Zoro stay in the same spot on the deck, quietly watching the clouds. 

“Luffy,” Zoro begins, feeling oddly unsteady and unbalanced. Luffy inclines his head just-so, an obvious  _ I’m listening.  _ “Have you thought about what we’re going to do? With Tori?” 

“I told Zoro and the others, she’s staying for now.”

“Until when?” Luffy shrugs. “What if it isn’t safe?” Zoro insists, throat going tight. (Her small, skinny little form lurching in front of him in a desperate and obvious bid at protection, arms and wings stretched out wide and trembling. Zoro can't help but picture the same, only instead of a harmless Nami, the Tori in his mind is staring down _Enel._ Or _Crocodile._ Or even fucking _Aarlong_ and the visceral terror that he feels is so immense.) 

“Then we’ll make it safe,” Luffy says, as if it is really just that easy. 

High up in the sky, Zoro thinks he can spot a bird, following the ship at a distance. 

_ How?  _

He doesn’t ask. 

* * *

Not even an hour later, Tori returns. 

“I see her!” Usopp shouts from the figurehead of the ship, binoculars trained upwards, followed by a much less sure, “...I think?” 

Only minutes later, an _owl_ the size of a human-child swoops low over the ship, circling around the crow’s nest. Zoro can see Sanji standing in the small space, hands gripping the edge of the wood, very carefully not reaching out. (He had been shaking, earlier. Shaking when he bolted for the crow’s nest. Shaking when Tori had bolted from  _ him. _ ) 

Zoro has _never_ seen the cook shake, before.

Tori lands on the highest point of the flagpole. 

The creature perched up there is unquestionably a bird, through and through. She looks scraggly and obscenely fluffy— _ far  _ fluffier than Zoro can ever recall any damn bird being. For a brief moment of dizzying anxiety, he wonders,  _ is she sick? How could we even treat a bird?  _ But then a beak gives way to a human face gradually, feathers rippling like water and disappearing into skin and wild, tangled brown curls that whip around her face with the wind. The clothes she was wearing are gone, now—probably lost to the wind and sea when she flew away and transformed—and she’s crouched atop the flag, peering straight down at Sanji in the nest. 

Zoro watches, barely  _ breathing,  _ while the cook stretches out his hands, as if to catch her, and the whole world seems to stop in the moments between him extending his arms and Tori considering them. 

Tori jumps, dropping like a stone, and Zoro’s heart  _ lurches  _ into his feet. He lunges, knowing he won’t make it anywhere close to catching her in time, knowing that the cook is  _ right there,  _ but still unable to quell the  _ thing  _ inside of him that says  _ she’s falling, oh fucking fuck, catch her—CATCH HER! _

At the last moment, her grey and brown speckled wings surge behind her in powerful upstrokes, slowing her decent. She all but barrels into Sanji’s chest, folding into his arms easily and— 

_ Zoro still can’t calm his racing heart.  _

The cook must sit down because he suddenly  _ can’t see either of them  _ and— 

“Zoro should go check on them,” Luffy says, placing a hand on his elbow. 

_ No, she won’t want me up there—  _

(Quivering little shoulders, with wings and arms spread, insistent  _ “no”s  _ and determination that Nami not take a single step closer to him—)

“Zoro needs to go,” Luffy remarks and  _ fuck,  _ Zoro can never hide anything from this idiot that he calls Captain, so fucking  _ perceptive  _ for all that he is  _ dense.  _ He giggles a little, that chuckling  _ shishishi  _ sound and says, “Zoro and Sanji are already so protective over Tori.”

And,  _ yeah,  _ okay. 

_ (Don’t get attached, you’re out of your depth.)  _

But his heart is saying one thing and his Captain is saying another so Zoro…

Goes anyways. 

He clambers up the rigging as quickly as his legs will carry him, hearing Sanji’s steady murmuring get louder and louder the higher he goes. It would almost be kind of soothing, at any other moment, with the way the setting sun is turning the ocean a spectacular shade of orange and the wood of  _ Merry _ a  glowing, golden-brown. Zoro’s not really paying attention, though. His instincts are too loud—something in him drumming an insistent beat of  _ be there, get there, be there, get there.  _

Zoro swings a leg up over the side of the crow’s nest and slides to the floor, the space small enough that his and the cook’s shoes are touching. 

Sanji’s got Tori bundled up in his suit jacket and tucked in his lap, his chin hooked over her head and her nose tucked up against his neck. She’s not holding him back—not clinging like she usually does—but she isn’t fighting it, either. Her human feet and human hands are tucked up into the coat that he’s thrown around her and she's tense, but otherwise compliant.

“I’m sorry, little bird,” he’s murmuring, among other things, when their eyes meet. Zoro has never seen him quite so rattled. 

Guilt lances through him like a hot brand. 

_ (You did this,  _ his traitorous mind hisses at him.) 

Tori shuffles a bit, head turning in a move so quintessentially  _ owl  _ that it Zoro almost wants to laugh.

“Hey, kid,” Zoro sort of croaks out. 

Tori leans forward, resting her forehead against Sanji’s shoulder and blinking sleepily in Zoro’s direction. “Hey,” she returns and something that has been tightly coiled uncomfortably in Zoro’s chest since the whole shit-show this afternoon unwinds. 

“I’m sorry,” he blurts. Sanji’s eyes feel especially perceptive and painful, so Zoro stares at the wood below them. 

“No like when they hit,” Tori offers. Although clearly sleepy (and fuck, she’s been flying for a straight hour, now, how could she not be tired?) she looks particularly thoughtful and considering. 

“‘They’?” Sanji gets out in a voice utterly gutted. 

“People,” she offers. “Hurts. People make hurts, sometimes.”

_ Who has made you hurt,  _ Zoro wants to demand. Wants  _ names  _ and  _ faces  _ with a kind of viciousness that is surprising, even to himself. He is helpless to forget how small she was only a week ago, curled up and sleeping in his lap in the infirmary. He cannot shake the terrified determination of her stance, how every minuscule inch of her had screamed  _ you will go through me if you want to touch him  _ and _Hell,_ she’s so fucking  _ young.  _

“Not anymore, little bird,” Sanji bites out. Zoro can see the cook’s hands twitch where he’s holding her. “Never me. I—I will never hurt you. I swear. _We_ would never hurt you.” And  _ oh,  _ there is something just as achingly vulnerable in the cook’s voice as there is in Zoro’s chest. It hurts to hear and it  _ especially  _ hurts knowing that the cook would never willingly let  _ Zoro  _ of all people hear him like this, if he had a choice. 

Zoro chances a look at the pair. Sanji’s eyes are clenched tight, his head bowed to rest lightly on top of Tori’s, his expression pained.  _ Fuck.  _ His usually steady, treasured hands— _ cook’s hands— _ are visibly trembling where he holds her tightly to his chest. 

Sleepy brown eyes watch Zoro from where Tori’s cheek is mushed against Sanji’s shoulder. She blinks at him, lazy and slow, a picture of gradual relaxation, a slow acceptance of the promise that she is safe. 

“Mari,” Tori lets out on a yawn. 

_ Oh. She means me. Mari-mo. Mari.  _ His heart constricts as if being gripped by a fist. 

“Y-yeah?” 

She considers him for a moment, looking about a minute away from sleep. “Is you okay?” Tori asks. 

_ Fucking Hell.  _ His heart lurches in his chest, his breathing ragged like that same invisible hand is squeezing his lungs. Something wounded and small inside of him stings with the same sharpness of Mihawk’s blade—stings with this little neglected child’s question, this  _ baby  _ that was eating rats out of the dumpster behind a bar, this  _ tiny little person  _ who knew only the word  _ no  _ and sports shiny cigarette burns down her shoulders and back. 

She is  _ worried  _ about  _ him.  _

“Yes, kid,” Zoro says, meaning entirely something else.  _ I would die for you, I think. I’m helpless to know how to help you, but everything in me wants to. What use is the title of the greatest if I can’t protect one fucking kid? Let me protect you for as long as you breathe.  _

“I’m okay," is what comes out. And, "You were… really brave.”

Tori hums, eyes closing. “Brave,” she repeats, turning over the new word and tasting it just as thoughtfully as she would a bite of food.

And right there, haloed by the setting sun and cradled in the cook’s arms, she falls asleep. 

* * *

Sanji  _ sincerely  _ does not want to look at Zoro. 

Merry’s crows-nest is small, leaving little space between them, even though their backs are against opposite sides of the thing. The tips of their shoes are pressed together—Sanji’s expensive, reinforced dress shoes and Zoro’s haggard yet sturdy old boots. 

Everything about this moment is unbearable. Well, everything save for  _ one  _ thing. 

Tori is  _ safe  _ and  _ sleeping  _ right in his arms. She must be cold in only his blazer,  _ but.  _ There is drool on his shoulder, feathers and matted hair tickling his face, and small arms wrapped tight around his neck and  _ Sanji can’t give this up, yet.  _

He’s a raw egg, dropped into a pot of boiling water much too hard. It has hit the bottom of the pot, little cracks splintering up the sides of the delicate shell, and spirals of clear egg whites are leaking out into the hot water, turning solid and bubbling up to the top. 

And Zoro is sitting _right fucking there_ , watching it happen. 

It feels  _ worse  _ than being naked,  _ this.  _ Sanji feels like a wounded animal, leaking distress and acrid emotion everywhere and for anyone to see. Because,  _ all the blues help him,  _ he’s so fucking  _ attached.  _

There is a child in his arms—a child that is not his and that is not _him,_ but one that has suffered so similarly—and he needs to see her safe, happy, and unharmed as much as he needs to fucking  _ breathe.  _ Sanji doesn’t quite understand why. Maybe it is his own childhood spent unwanted, unloved, and accruing bruises until, eventually, the starving was as literal as it was figurative. Maybe it is some primal parental instinct he didn’t know he had—(it’s not like Sanji ever spent a good deal of time around children before). Maybe it’s just  _ unavoidable  _ with her big, brown eyes, fluffy speckled feathers, and penchant for snatching up new words like other children snatch up interesting bugs or lizards. 

But the truth of it is that Sanji is  _ attached.  _ And not only that, his attachment is pulling his darkest, most shameful nightmares straight to the surface. 

His attachment is going to rip him apart.

Egg whites spilling forth from a cracked shell...

Zoro, blessedly, is silent while Sanji just…  _ holds  _ her and  _ breathes.  _

Someone or some _ones_ used this child ( _ mine,  _ a part of him that he can’t bear to acknowledge whispers fervently:  _ mine, my child)  _ as a fucking _ashtray_. This starving, tiny, hollow-boned little girl was somebody’s _thing,_ abused like an _object_ _.  _

(And  _ oh  _ how Tori tenses when Luffy yells, skittering around the kitchen and orbiting Sanji's path anxiously, like she’s making herself  _ ready  _ for the things that may come. How she refuses to sleep in a bed or a hammock, choosing high-up, hard to reach places… How she knows so few words and thinks  _ very, very  _ hard about who she talks to and what she says when she does… How she shies away from hands and how she snatches tiny little morsels of food and hides them around the ship and how,  _ and how… how...)  _

(He had acted much the same when Zeff had gotten hold of him, hadn’t he? Always underfoot, nervous, and bracing himself for the eventuality of his luck running out.) 

“There was this place in the village I grew up in,” Zoro says, sudden and unexpected. It breaks the silence between them into so many shards of glass. Miracle of miracles, Tori does not so much as _stir._

When Sanji doesn’t interrupt, Zoro takes a breath. Then, he keeps going. 

“It was a stretch of road that mainly led to bars and brothels and all sorts of seedy places kids shouldn’t be. They all moved in on top of the ruins of some other city, I guess. There were always old things hidden with the new ones. One used to be a barn, I think. Wasn’t really anything more than a couple walls and what used to be a roof.” A deep breath, a meditative one. Steeling himself for something. 

“I lived there, in that barn. Right next to what I think was a whore-house.

“'Never had any parents or family. It was always just me. I ate what I could get and stole what I could steal and as long as I didn’t look anybody in the eyes or cause trouble, people just pretended I wasn’t there.” Zoro huffs a laugh, as dry and rough as sandpaper. “‘Used to sneak into one of the bars and hide under tables… listen to the assholes that drank there tell stories. Stuff about their _women_ back home and bar fights and the stupid fuckin' government.

“Anyways, this guy comes into the city, specifically to one of those shitty bars. A really fancy-looking guy. He’s got a kimono and glasses and was just about the cleanest guy I’d ever seen. He was a swordsman… I tried to steal his sword. Couldn’t barely even  _ lift  _ the thing, but I thought I could get away with it. I didn’t, obviously." A pause. Something that is trying but failing to be a real smile. "Well, turned out the guy had a kid about my age. And, he owned a  dojo  out on the land outside of the city _.  _ So…

“That’s where I… grew up. With him and his daughter and the other boys training there. But, before that…” 

Sanji is looking at him—when did he start looking at him? He doesn’t remember deciding to. Zoro’s got this ridiculous half-smile on his face. It isn’t an expression that belongs on the man: vaguely uncomfortable and sheepish, even bleeding into something self-deprecating. 

For a brief flicker of a moment, Zoro meets his eyes before looking away. His jaw goes tight, his expression fierce—something much more fitting for him. 

“I won’t regret bringing her here,” and  _ gods of the sea,  _ the conviction in Zoro’s eyes is enough to make Sanji’s heart race, “I can’t regret that. Because I  _ know. _ ” 

What he knows, he doesn’t have to say. Zoro’s story makes it clear enough. 

Sanji swallows. “What was her name? The daughter of your teacher?” he asks, startled by his own impulse to know, to prod just a little bit deeper into this never-before seen side to the man. _Does the crew know?_ he wonders. _Does Luffy even know?_

Zoro looks surprised, too. But instead of calling Sanji out on the oddity of the question, the other man just smiles, a sad (yet proud) little tilt of the corners of his mouth. 

“Kuina. She was going to be the greatest.” 

_ Was?  _ But Sanji doesn’t have to ask. The answer is already there in his eyes. Zoro knows loss. 

Sanji knows he should say something—offer something up into this strange bubble of fragile  _ feeling  _ between them. But the words that he might find flee him and the fear stops his throat.

_ (weak, weak, weak—)  _

“It’s getting colder. We should get her inside,” Sanji offers instead. 

Zoro nods and together, they descend. 

* * *

In the very early morning hours, this is how it usually goes:

Sanji will be the first to rise (if he already wasn’t on watch) and he’ll roll unsteadily to his feet from wherever he’s crashed for the night (whether that happens to be in an unoccupied hammock or, more frequently, on the floor). Although he is quiet, Tori has exceptional ears, and she’ll begin to stir from where she “nests” on top of the lockers. It also can’t hurt that she can see in the dark—something the crew had discovered in turn, watching her unsettling glowing eyes follow them easily in the dead of night anytime they needed to get up to piss or get a drink of water. 

The cook will get dressed in the pre-dawn dark and she’ll follow after him, stretching and combing fingers meticulously through her feathers.  _ Preening,  _ Robin had explained.  _ Preening is a maintenance behavior found in birds that involves the use of the beak to position feathers, interlock feather barbules that have become separated, clean plumage, and keep ectoparasites in check. _

Sanji will quietly urge her to go back to sleep for awhile longer. “It’s early, little bird” or “get some more rest”, but she always ignores him and follows him to the kitchen anyways. 

This morning, Sanji stubs his toe on the edge of the table getting dressed, and the slight sound is enough to half-rouse Zoro from his tenuous sleep. True to pattern, Tori stands not far off, inhuman eyes faintly glowing in the dark, quick fingers working meticulously through her wings. Zoro extends his half-conscious awareness from the bottom hammock he’s occupying and carefully listens to their exchange. 

“Tori-chwan, you really should rest more. Nami-swan says we’ll be coming up on an island, today.” 

“Exploring?” she asks, voice hushed for the sake of the others. 

Sanji pats the top of her head, Tori’s curls too matted and crazy to attempt to comb fingers through. “Yeah, lots of it, probably. I heard the girls plan on taking you shopping for some clothes of your own.” 

Tori hums. “‘Kay,” she offers after a beat, followed by a clicking noise deep in her chest. 

After another moment, Sanji disappears above-deck. Zoro assumes she follows him.

Content to fall back asleep, Zoro turns from his back onto his side until— 

Warm little hands shove at his shoulders. His eyes snap open. Tori’s gleaming ones peer down at him and she pushes again. 

“Scooch,” she whispers. 

_ Oh.  _

Heart in his throat, Zoro moves over as best as he can in the small netted hammock and reaches out a hand. She gets a steady grip on his wrist and carefully climbs her way into the hammock beside him. Tori squirms until she’s pressed against his chest, one wing tucked under her and one thrown over Zoro’s side like the world’s smallest (and softest) blanket. 

More unsure of himself than Zoro can ever remember feeling, it takes him an age to realize that Tori  _ expects to be held  _ if the way she’s staring pointedly at him is any indication. 

_ Well?  _ her keen eyes say.

Zoro places a gentle hand on her back. He feels her exhale once, slow and sleepy. Something in him  _ aches.  _

They fall back asleep together. An apology and an acceptance all at once. 

* * *

There is a palpable air of excitement as the crew sets eyes on the next island. Red and orange-leafed trees greet them from the shore and crisp, cool water laps against the  _ Merry’s  _ hull as they pull into a quaint little dock. Houses are visible from the town’s harbor with shingled roofs in shades of maroon and pink. The air smells faintly of spice and something else that is most definitely  _ autumn.  _

“Welcome to Wywath,” the dock attendant, a freckle-faced woman with wide shoulders and strong arms greets them. Her beauty is as radiant as her strength, and Sanji tells her so, leaning as far out over the rail of the Merry as he can manage without face-planting onto the dock. 

“Well nice to meet you too!” she calls back after a brief moment of laughter. The slight gap between her two front teeth is nothing but endearing, especially when paired with her smile. Sanji throws as many compliments her way as he can manage in a single breath. 

“Do you guys have meat here?” Luffy asks, leaping down from the  _ Merry  _ before they’ve even dropped anchor. 

“Uh—yeah,” the dock attendant replies, a little baffles. _How did your ankles not shatter from that jump?_ her eyes are _screaming._

“Awesome!” Luffy adjusts his hat and starts to puzzle out where he might  _ find  _ meat for himself while the rest of the crew eagerly disembarks. 

Nami sighs and stretches, face tilted up to the sun. “The air here is so refreshing!” she says, smile wide and relaxed. 

“Air is air,” Zoro grunts.

Sanji elbows the brute in the side. It is what he  _ deserves.  _

Tori is among the first to disembark the Merry, leaping off of the railing and flying low to the ground, circling the small harbor. Now, she comes to a graceful landing at Luffy’s side, startling the poor (and _beautiful)_ lady working here.

“Woah!” the dock attendant lets out. “Hi, little one. And who might you be?” She smiles at Tori, bending down so that she’s slightly less towering. 

“This is Tori!” Luffy announces, placing a hand on her head. “She’s an owl.” 

“Hel-lo,” Tori dutifully chirps. Quite literally,  _ chirps.  _

“Nice to meet you, Tori. My name’s Ann. If y’all have any questions about Wywath, I’m happy to answer 'em.” 

“How long will it take for the log to set?” Nami asks. 

“Should only take about eight hours,” Ann offers. 

“Where’s the meat?” Luffy demands.

“There are a few restaurants in town. Follow the right-most road towards the houses and you can’t miss it.” 

“What about shopping?”

Ann turns back to Nami, smiling graciously. “Also in town. Shouldn’t be too hard to find whatever you’re looking for, here.” 

Sanji is surprised by the island’s general hospitality, but nonetheless grateful for it. If there’s anything he needs right now, it’s an  _ easy  _ day. Something to put his head back on straight. Something that will give him the time and the distance to piece himself together again. 

They decide to break into two groups. Luffy, Zoro, head out to explore with Usopp as their appointed liaison. 

“I swear on all the gold in the world, Usopp, if you let them make trouble for this nice town, I will bankrupt you into an early grave,” Nami-swan had threatened (beautifully, if Sanji might add.) 

Robin, Nami, Sanji, and Chopper are to go shopping for supplies, including clothes for Tori, medical equipment, and food. Since their trip on the previous island was cut short, they’re still low on a good amount of necessary items. 

Tori is the picture of perfect behavior as they meander through the town. She didn’t want to hold Sanji’s hand (which didn’t sting  _ at all,  _ nope. He’s capable of being an adult about this and glad for her that she feels safe enough to walk on her own. He is absolutely _fine._ ) Instead, Tori keeps pace next to Robin, taking in all the sights eagerly with the archaeologist at the head of their little group.

The town on the island of Wywath—also named Wywath—is not particularly busy or crowded. The cobblestone path that they follow feels like it was stolen directly from a story book.

Overhead, some sort of magpie or grackle caws and Tori stops dead in her tracks. From where he stands, Sanji can see her pupils dilate and contract. The bird caws again, landing on the roof of a candle store. Captivated, Tori rushes over to Sanji’s side where she then grabs his hand and tugs, pointing urgently at the bird with her other. 

“ _Him_ ,” she breathes, staring at the bird with _enormous_ eyes. 

It takes all of Sanji’s self control to stop from laughing. He's the only one that manages to resist the urge.

Eventually, they usher her away from the bird and towards a boutique boasting a vast collection of both women and children’s clothing. A bell chimes gently over the door as they enter.

“Welcome in! Let us know if you need anything,” the worker at the front of the store recites dutifully. 

As a unit, they gently guide Tori over to the kid’s section where Nami then crouches to the girl’s level.

“We’re here to get clothes for you, Tori-chan. Why don’t you start by showing us what you like? You can grab anything that you want, alright?” Nami was eager for a chance to spoil the little girl after the fiasco that was yesterday. The crew as a whole was relieved to find that, come the morning, Tori did not appear to hold any grudge towards Nami. Once she had established that Zoro was fine and Nami had no intentions of doing anybody any real harm (and that Nami could talk quietly, without shouting even once) Tori had seemed to shake the whole event off easily. 

(Usopp, having spent the most time around children out of any of them, had shrugged. “Kids are just like that,” he had said. “Water off a duck’s back and all. Things don’t stick to them like you expect them to.”) 

Tori nods, looking intently into Nami’s eyes before disappearing between racks of clothing. 

(Something in Sanji’s chest feels so  _ warm  _ watching her browse through kids’ clothes like any other kid. Usually, he’d take this opportunity to fawn over the marvelous ladies and aid in their shopping, offering to ferry clothes back and forth between the dressing rooms and provide thoughtful compliments on their radiant beauty, but now… The greater part of him would rather just watch Tori thoughtfully examine everything that catches her eye.) 

“She is incredibly brilliant,” Robin offers, suddenly at his side without Sanji having noticed her approach. 

“Is she?” Sanji asks. He doesn’t have the kind of experience that Usopp does with kids. He’s not sure what six-year olds should be like, on average. 

Robin hums, flicking absently through a rack of blouses at his side. “Her aptitude for language is incredible. She’s gone from hardly communicating to constructing basic sentences in a little over a week. It’s truly remarkable.” Robin’s dark eyes shine with something that is pleased and fond. “Tori-chan would make a wonderful little scholar. What do you think about teaching her the alphabet, Cook-san?” 

Surprised by the question, Sanji can only utter his immediate reaction, “Why ask me?” 

“You and Swordsman-san have taken on quite the guardian role over young Tori-chan, wouldn’t you say?” 

Sanji’s heart gives a tight little lurch in his chest. “I don’t know about that,” he manages through the swell of emotion inside of him. 

_ (Don’t get attached or it’ll break your heart when she has to leave. Because, really, you know she will have to leave. This life isn’t safe for a kid—the path to the One Piece is not like a floating restaurant on the sea. So stop fucking getting attached—)  _

Robin simply hums. 

Just then, Tori rushes over to Nami, holding an armful of items for the beautiful navigator to inspect. 

“Let’s see what she’s picked out, shall we?” Robin suggests. 

Nami takes the offered pile and holds a particular piece aloft with a frown. It’s a fuzzy pullover with a high, zippered collar. It is also, notably, covered in a pattern of cartoonishly grim skulls done in shades of black and white. 

“Tori, honey, don’t you want something from the girl’s section?” Nami asks. 

“Is soft,” Tori declares, twisting her little hands up in the fabric. 

“It is soft,” Sanji corrects absently. 

“It is soft,” she repeats. 

“I’m sure there are things just as soft in the girl’s section!” Nami says with an enthusiastic smile. “What about a nice dress or a cute skirt? Doesn’t that sound nicer than skulls?” 

Tori blinks at her as if the idea of anything being better than  _ skulls  _ is simply inconceivable. “No,” she states, simply. “This one.” 

Nami gives a slight frown. “We’ll come back to it. C’mon, let’s go do some trying-on!” With that, she whisks Tori away towards the dressing rooms. 

* * *

At some point during the long excursion, Chopper and Robin take their purchases and head out to find a pharmacy and a library respectively. In no particular rush, Sanji decides to stay and wait until Nami and Tori finish, and he plants himself on a cushioned bench by the dressing rooms. Eventually, Luffy, Usopp, and Zoro wander in. 

Luffy’s picked up a garish orange scarf sometime during the day (Sanji sincerely hopes that he did not simply steal it from an unsuspecting towns person) and all three of them are holding paper cups of a drink that smells like spiced apple cider. 

“There you are!” Luffy shouts as soon as he spots him, rushing over through the aisles of clothes. “Sanji! Try this! It’s  _ good!  _ Can you make more of it?” and he promptly shoves the hot cup into his hands. 

It is rather good. Cinnamon, nutmeg, and pumpkin pie spice have been mixed artfully into the hot apple cider with notes of vanilla and brown sugar to add a not-overpowering sweetness. 

“I should be able to replicate it if we pick up some apples while we’re here,” Sanji muses, passing the cup back over to Luffy. 

“I want Tori to try it! Hey! Tori!” he calls, loud and obnoxious. The man working the register glares at them. 

Tori’s head pops out from behind the curtain, dressed again in a hodgepodge of Chopper’s clothing and the blazer that Sanji has come to accept he is  _ never  _ getting back, despite the fact that it absolutely dwarfs her. (Tori insists on wearing it with the collar popped up, too, of all things.)

“Oh, good! Zoro, you can help us carry Tori-chan’s clothes. We’ve just about finished,” Nami declares, emerging behind her with a veritable mountain of items. A prominent vein in Zoro’s forehead twitches and Sanji would be inclined to laugh at him, if his attention were not otherwise occupied. 

Notably absent from the haul of clothing is the skull-patterned pullover that Tori had first expressed interest in. Tori is approaching him with a faintly troubled expression, holding the aforementioned item in her hands. She taps him lightly on the arm with it. 

“I… want this one,” she mutters, looking at the floor. After a moment, she adds, louder and with a distinct frown. “Shoes are shit.” 

Usopp, predictably, laughs so hard that he spews cider all over himself.

(The store clerk glares at them even _harder.)_

Sanji curses his penchant for swearing. Oh, well. It’s not like  _ he  _ was any better at her age. Maybe. 

“Let’s ask Nami-swan, then,” Sanji encourages and together they approach the register, deciding to table the cursing conversation for now. Tori shuffles nervously at his side, clutching the hideous thing to her chest and staring pointedly at the floor. Sanji prompts her with a gentle hand on her back and a, “What do you say?” 

“Peas?” Tori mumbles in Nami's general direction. 

“Please,” Sanji amends. 

“Pl-ease,” Tori repeats, no less quietly. 

“Tori, we talked about this,” Nami sighs, keeping her voice intentionally gentle. “Wouldn’t it be better to wear all the cute outfits you got instead? That jacket is for boys, hun’.” 

Sanji feels vaguely uncomfortable, listening in—like a child himself, getting caught staring into the windows of women's boutique stores and getting scolded by Zeff. It’s best she learns these things now rather than later, like Sanji had to. (He imagines girls are teased _less_ for being inclined to boy’s items than boys are for taking an interest in girl’s items, but Nami’s concern seems straightforward enough.) 

Luffy wanders over, finger planted firmly inside his own nose. “Eh?” After a moment, he looks down at the jacket Tori’s still clutching tightly, like she anticipates someone is going to take it from her and that she's willing to fight for it. “Woah! This is so cool!” Luffy shouts, excitement lighting up his whole face. “Nami! Nami, I want one. Then we can match,” he declares, attempting to ruffle Tori’s matted, wild hair. 

“But, Luffy—?” Nami starts, only for him to interject. 

“Clothes are clothes, Nami. If she likes it, she should have it,” Luffy says, simple as that. 

But Sanji  _ knows  _ things are rarely that simple, especially about matters of who gets to wear what and for what reasons. (He grew up on a ship of ex-pirates—all men that understood the value of  _ manhood  _ and made sure he knew it.) 

“Luffy, Nami-swan is right.” 

“Maybe, but we’re pirates, Sanji,” Luffy muses, picking his nose. “She can wear what she wants. Pirates don’t care about that stuff.” 

And, alright, maybe  _ Luffy  _ doesn’t care, but the rest of the world will. And Tori isn’t even a  _ pirate,  _ she’s just here until they figure out what to do— _ don’t think about that yet. _ Sanji goes to protest but the words die in his throat when he catches sight of Tori’s openly awed expression as she stares up at Luffy. 

“I can?” Tori flutters her wings just a little. 

Luffy laughs. “Yeah, of course.” 

Nami sighs. “Fine. But it’s coming out of  _ your  _ pocket. And don't get excited, I doubt they make that in your size." 

Tori gently slides the item up onto the counter with a shy little smile. Her wings lightly quiver with what must be joy at her back. Luffy is quick to capture all her attention again, handing her the apple cider and instructing her on how to drink it—”blow on it so it cools off, it’s hot still. Like this—”and her eyes light up at the taste. 

(Maybe there are worse things in the world than a little girl wearing an ugly jacket meant for boys.)

* * *

The crew separates again mid-afternoon, with the ladies heading for the luxury spa that the town proudly boasts and the rest of the crew heading out to complete various other errands. Nami and Robin are insistent that Tori come with them. 

“Her hair is a literal  _ nest,  _ Sanji-kun,” Nami says. And, well, truth of that aside, Sanji is wholly weak to refuse the brilliant and beautiful Nami-swan anything her heart desires. 

So, for the first time since Tori’s entrance into their lives, he finds himself well and truly alone, left to restock the food supply in relative peace and quiet. 

_ It’s not weird,  _ Sanji tells himself, firmly ignoring the strange absence of feathers in his periphery and a child underfoot.  He lights up a cigarette and sets about locating the items on his list, letting the first blissful hit of nicotine calm his suddenly anxious mind. 

(It is an easy thing to ignore how painful it will be to return to this kind of routine solitude again, once Tori is gone.  _ I missed my privacy,  _ Sanji tells himself sternly as he weaves through a local farmer’s market.  _ And it’s not like I’m ever really alone with this crew. It’ll be nice to no longer have a young child to worry about,  _ he lies.)

( _ I’ll be fine.)  _

He drowns the taste of his own doubt with tobacco. 

* * *

Zoro watches with fond amusement as Luffy declares they should have a race back to the Merry. Only an hour or so remains until the log pose is ready and the sun is soon to set. Luffy, full of boundless energy as  _ always,  _ is eager to resume sailing and head on to the next island. Unfortunately for him, Chopper seems way too tired to indulge him. 

From Tori’s shopping trip to their many other errands, the day has left the little doctor especially drained. And honestly, the only one of them equally as enthused as they were upon docking is Luffy. Zoro could do with a nap himself. Or several.

Chopper is currently refusing Luffy’s invitation to race him for about the millionth time. 

“Aw, but come on! The trees make for the perfect sling-shots,” Luffy argues. “Ne, I’ll give you my dessert tonight if you win,” he sing-songs. 

“No you won’t!” Chopper, Zoro, and Usopp bark, incredulous. 

Luffy just laughs. “Fine, you’re right. But please? Please race me, Chopper?” 

“For the last time, no!” 

“Oi, Luffy!” Nami’s unmistakable voice calls from some distance behind them. The trio stops in the middle of the cobblestone path, turning back in the direction of her voice. 

Approaching from the direction of what Zoro thinks is the docks (which doesn’t really make any sense, because weren’t they going to a bathhouse or whatever?) are Nami, Robin and Tori. Although, Tori is… 

Pretty unrecognizable, actually. 

“Woah, Tori looks so much better!” Usopp cries, smiling. 

And really, she  _ does.  _

The girls have obviously coaxed her into a bath that was much more thorough than anything Sanji could convince her to do on the  _ Merry.  _ Perhaps the large, ornate hot-springs that appeared on the flyers for the place had a hand in that, too. Either way, she’s  _ clean.  _ Cleaner than she has been since Zoro coaxed her out of that alley. They’ve obviously changed her into a new outfit, a  _ Doskoi Panda  _ shirt with neat little holes cut in the back for her wings and a blue skirt. The cook’s stupid blazer is tied around her waist by the sleeves, looking more like a cape than anything given how long the thing is for her. But it is not any of this that strikes Zoro the most. 

Somehow, Robin and Nami have managed to untangle the mess that was Tori's hair. A neat, chin-length mess of tightly wound dark brown curls bounces with every step Tori takes down the path, swinging her hands back and forth at her sides and making little chattering bird noises as she spots them. 

She looks, in all honesty, like a normal kid. Save for the fact that she’s still noticeably rather malnourished (but still much better off than she had been) and that she has wings.

Her bare feet make a comical kind of  _ slap, slap, slap  _ sound on the path as she approaches. Zoro raises an eyebrow, to which Nami only sighs. 

“She  _ refuses  _ to wear any kind of shoes,” she explains, sounding rather  _ exhausted  _ by the whole thing. 

“Shoes are shit!” Tori announces while Luffy descends on her bouncy and clean hair, winding the curls gently around his fingers and letting them spring back towards her head. 

“What’s this I hear about a race, Sencho?” Robin muses. 

Chopper can only groan his displeasure. 

Luffy opens his mouth to explain, but before he can get there, Tori asks, “What’s ‘race’?” 

Usopp bends down to her level. “Well, Tori-chan, as the fastest man in the world, I’d be happy to answer that question. A race is a contest of  _ speed— _ the most worthy of athletic pursuits! I once outran a whole herd of cheetahs as we raced across the vast deserts of Alabasta—”

“You go fast?” Tori gasps, wings twitching in open delight. 

(The way her whole face lights up at the prospect does  _ not  _ make Zoro feel warm all the way to his bones. He’s the demon of East Blue, for fuck’s sake. He should _not_ be such a goner for a kid he’s known only for a week.) 

“Yeah!” Luffy replies. “As fast as you can!” 

“Yes, yes, yes. That, now! Pl-ease!” Tori chants. With that, she unfurls her wings, extending them out fully and furiously trying to untie the blazer from around her waist. 

“U-uh, Luffy? Should we let her race? It’s kind of far, and what if she can’t keep up with you?” Usopp is quick to fret. Zoro feels about the same, but he’s less inclined to shut this thing down with how eager Tori seems. Besides, he trusts Luffy's judgement. 

“You can keep up, can’t you, Tori?” Luffy asks at the very same time as Tori angrily shouts, “I can go fast!” in the face of Usopp’s (reasonable) protests. 

“Well,” Robin interjects, a sly smile on her face. “Owls have been said to fly at a speed of up to sixty-five kilometers per hour. Navigator-san, how is the wind? Would you say things are at an optimal condition for flight?” 

“Well, y-yes, but—”

“Great! Then let’s go!” And with no more warning than that, Luffy stretches his arms out to grip the nearest two trees on either side of the road and promptly  _ launches  _ himself in what may or may not be the direction of  _ Merry  _ (Zoro doesn’t think it is, but no one else seems to have any protests). 

“O-Oi, Tori!” Usopp tries, but it’s too late. 

The cook’s blazer hits the ground in front of Zoro’s feet, and with a ferocious smile—more confident than Zoro has ever seen her—Tori takes off running, gaining speed and quickly leaving the ground in a powerful burst of feathers. The force of her takeoff threatens to send Usopp’s bandanna flying away. 

A piercing  _ screeeeeech!  _ splits the air, followed by Luffy’s unmistakable whooping cries of delight. 

* * *

The sound is what alerts Sanji first. He could hear Luffy coming from a mile away when he carries on making sound like that. But Luffy is not who appears back at the  _ Merry  _ first. 

_ Skreeeee! _

A wide eyed Tori lands gracefully on the rails of the ship, chest heaving with exertion. A smile wider than anything Sanji has ever  _ seen  _ threatens to split her face in two. 

“Did you see? Did you see? I race. I  _ race.  _ I is fast,” Tori babbles, practically shouting in giddy excitement. Her talons cling tightly to the rails of the ship, no-doubt leaving little grooves that Usopp is bound to grumble about. 

Sanji is shocked beyond words at her sudden appearance. 

“Wow, Princess… Where’d you come from? Where are the others?” he asks, scanning the horizon for Luffy. 

“I race. I race,” she tells him, wings flapping in little bursts of delighted energy. 

A few moments later, Luffy comes careening into view and tumbling onto the deck with a painful sounding rubber  _ twang.  _

“Tori, that was  _ amazing!”  _ he shouts, springing to his feet. “You were so  _ fast! _ ” 

“I were fast! I were fast!” Tori chants. 

Soon they’re practically dancing around each other on the deck, giddy and happy as can be.  The sight is only ruined by the little voice in the back of Sanji’s head, reminding him of how  _ temporary  _ this all is. How temporary it  _ must  _ be. 

_ Don’t get too attached,  _ this cautious and bitter part of him hisses.  _ How long can this really last? _

As he watches Tori and Luffy roll around, cackling on the deck, Sanji knows one thing and one thing only. 

When Tori leaves them, it is going to break his heart. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The skull pullover Tori found is a real thing that I owed (and loved) when I was a kid. I found one [here](https://poshmark.com/listing/Old-navy-Boys-skull-pull-over-5dcabe2e8d653d781939e322) so that you too can behold and appreciate this fantastic monstrosity. 
> 
> Robin's definition of preening came courtesy of Wikipedia.


	4. Long Ring Island

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She had known she was safe. She must have known that for days, now. Ever since she came back to them that night—came back to Sanji in the crow’s nest—she must have known. But children need more than safety. 
> 
> Children need to be wanted. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> considering renaming this story to "Abundance of Italics"
> 
> Ya'll are so great. Your comments give me life and so, so much joy. Peep the end-notes for a couple BIRD FACTS! 
> 
> A small disclaimer for this chapter: I am not a physicist. I do not know physics. Please don't yell at me in the notes about the physics in this chapter. I know that I know nothing.

“Cookie?” Tori asks, peeking down the ladder into the boy’s cabin. A light sheen of rain sprays down the open hatch. Zoro blinks up at her from where he and Usopp are playing cards on the rug and catches some cold drops on his face.

Water drips off of the ends of Tori’s hair as she hangs upside-down, peering into the room. At the slightest hint of food, Luffy perks up from where he had been napping in one of the hammocks. 

“Food?” Luffy mumbles, rubbing at an eye. 

“Close the door, Tori,” Usopp says as he waves at her to come in. “You’re letting in the rain.” 

“Sorry.” There’s the faint sound of shuffling, the door closing, and then a mass of water-logged feathers collides with Zoro’s side, sending his hand of cards flying. 

“Oi!” 

A bony elbow digs painfully into his ribs while Tori rights herself. She ignores him and shakes out her wet hair like a dog. Usopp and Luffy recoil from the spray, shrieking. 

“Cookie?” She repeats once she’s done, looking at Zoro expectantly. 

“What? Go ask the Cook if you’re hungry, I don’t have anything,” he grumbles. 

“No. Where’s cookie?” Tori looks at him like he’s being especially  _ dense.  _ Zoro’s used to this expression, but typically only from Nami or the Cook _.  _ Somehow, being stared at by a child as if  _ he’s  _ the real child here is  _ infinitely more annoying  _ than when _they_ do it.

“Do I  _ look  _ like Curly-brow?” Zoro says, ushering her back towards the ladder. 

Tori turns and bites at his fingers— _ playfully _ . (Zoro only entertains it when she bites at him because it makes Sanji and Nami go fucking  _ apeshit.  _ The calluses on his fingers are so thick that he can only really feel it when she bites him with that damn owl’s beak, anyways. Now  _ that  _ stings. This is more like a puppy showing its teeth.) 

Zoro still shouts anyways, snatching his hand back. Tori frowns at him in an obnoxious way that she  _ had  _ to have picked up from the cook. She ruffles her own feathers, puffing them up and soothing them down again. 

“Where is him?” Tori asks with deliberate slowness. 

“Sanji?” Usopp asks. 

“Yes, Cookie,” Tori says, and everyone just kind of... 

_ Blinks.  _

“Oh my god,” Usopp wheezes before collapsing into a fit of hysterics. Luffy is no better off, squealing and shrieking where he rolls around on the floor. 

“ _ ‘Cookie!’ _ Like  _ Cook-y!”  _ Luffy wails, slapping the floor and turning red in the face with laughter. “Zoro! Tori copied  _ Zoro!”  _

Usopp  _ howls.  _ “Sanji’s a  _ daddy! ‘Cooky’  _ oh my  _ god,  _ Luffy,  _ help—”  _ he wheezes, gasping for breath. “Wait—wait, does that make Zoro  _ mommy? _ ” 

“SHUT UP!” Zoro shouts, flushing red with  _ anger— _ and not at all in any kind of embarrassment. 

“HEY SHITHEADS! Nami-swan says hands on deck!” Sanji calls, throwing open the door and sending a gust of frigid sea-spray and rain down on their heads. 

“Cooky!” Tori chirps, reaching her arms out as if she expects to be picked up. 

(Watching the Cook’s face turn  _ tomato-red  _ makes all the teasing worth it _.) _

“Nah,” Luffy says abruptly, still recovering from his fit of laughter. “Sanji is  _ definitely  _ the mom.” 

"EXCUSE ME?"

* * *

The next island along the log-pose is…  _ weird.  _

Everything about Long Ring island seems designed with the intention of setting Zoro’s teeth on edge with irritation. Or, perhaps, his growing annoyance comes down to Luffy’s incessant  _ screaming  _ about everything he sees. 

Luffy, Chopper, and Usopp have got themselves running in circles with excitement over every  _ fucking  _ thing about this place, from the obscenely tall trees to the bizarre and disturbingly elongated animals. Their combined hyperactive energy is enough to give Zoro a migraine. He's viciously relieved when the three of them run off.

“Thank you for being the only quiet one on this whole damn ship,” Zoro grumbles. 

Beside him, Tori is flat on her back in the grass, arms spread and eyes closed. A serene little smile splits her face. 

As soon as they had set foot on the island, she had dashed out into the tall grass with an expression of giddy excitement. “Green!” Tori had shouted as the rest of the crew approached. She had them promptly flung herself down in the middle of the field like she was about to start making snow-angels in the grass. She hadn’t moved since. 

Tori cracks one eye open and smirks at him—which, _okay, who taught her that?_

“‘Welcome,” she replies. 

“It’s ‘your welcome’, Kid,” Zoro grouches. 

“Yes, yours.” 

Luffy, Chopper, and Usopp have long since run off and disappeared, leaving the remaining four crew members to approach the frankly  _ massive  _ pirate ship looming on the other end of the shore. Tori, predictably, follows after them because it is where  _ Sanji  _ is going. 

“That ship is enormous,” Nami breathes, staring up at the large sails as they crest over an adjacent hill. 

Suddenly, a winged Tori takes off into the air in the direction of the ship. The Cook shouts, lurching forward as if to stop her, but she’s already gone. 

_ Shit.  _

Zoro breaks into a sprint, not waiting another moment to see if the others follow. He can barely hear Robin’s voice over the sudden rush of blood in his own ears. 

“We should hurry. It would be unfortunate if young Tori was the first to meet possible enemy pirates,” Robin muses.  Sanji curses a blue streak and footsteps follow in Zoro’s wake, a vice of panic tightening around them.

Wordless shouts echo across the field as they draw closer to the ship. Then, the unmistakable sound of a gunshot.

Zoro’s heart gives a painful jerk and squeeze in his chest, stopping up all the air in his throat for just a moment. He wants to cut something. Or scream. Or  _ both.  _

But when they get to the ship, there is no  _ Tori.  _ Just a rowdy group of pirates in ridiculous masks, going on about a  _ Davy Back fight.  _ And Zoro might be anxious about the kid—(and what an insufficient word “anxious” is for what he’s feeling in this moment because he most  _ definitely  _ heard a gunshot and Tori is _still_ nowhere in sight and his heart is going double-time in his fucking chest)—but it is Zoro’s duty as first-mate to defend the honor of his crew and his captain, so that is what he does. 

“In this game you ante up your friends and your pride. If you win, you grow that much stronger. If you lose, you run the risk of falling but never being able to get back up again,” Sanji explains, expression grim. 

Nami protests, going on about how  _ ridiculous  _ and  _ pointless  _ a Davy-Back fight is and Zoro has a brief moment of gratitude for the Cook as he explains all this to her. Like this, with his very teeth buzzing and his skin crawling because he  _ doesn’t have eyes on Tori,  _ Zoro doesn’t have the patience to explain it himself. He thoroughly scans every inch of the Foxy Pirate’s ship with his eyes as they talk. 

“If you run away or cheat, you  _ will  _ become a laughing stock,” Sanji says, cigarette smoke spilling from his lips.

“So? Let them laugh! Who cares?” Nami throws out her arms, a universal gesture of  _ so what?  _

“I do. I would rather die,” Zoro says, because it’s  _ true.  _ Luffy’s dream—hell, his  _ own  _ dream—is dependent on the kind of honor that Nami so easily dismisses. Without respect, what value is the title of  _ best  _ or  _ king?  _

“Me too,” Sanji states plainly, and Zoro smothers his own surprise. 

_ Huh.  _

( _ People have hurt me,  _ Tori had said in her own way, and the Cook had hissed,  _ Not anymore, little bird,  _ and perhaps they are more similar than Zoro had ever let himself think.) 

More gunfire—a signal that somewhere on this island, Luffy has accepted the challenge. The Foxy Pirates erupt into cheer. And then, high above, on the very top of the Foxy Pirates’ highest mast, a little shape moves. 

_ Tori.  _

A loud  _ screech  _ cuts through the air . The distinct shape of a bird swoops low over the assembled Foxy Pirates on the deck of the ship, talons grazing the tips of those ridiculous masks and even snatching up a hat right off one of the crew member’s heads. 

_ This fucking kid.  _

Zoro watches the full fledged owl that is Tori whip the pirates up into a frenzy of shouting and panic before she finally settles in a half-human, half-bird form, perched on the figurehead of the ship with a stolen hat on her head. 

“Tori-chan!” Sanji calls out and Zoro can visibly  _ see  _ the tension held in the Cook’s shoulders. These guys are  _ armed  _ and  _ pissed _ . 

“C’mon, Kid! Get down here!” Zoro shouts with one hand resting on  _ Wado.  _

“What the fuck is  _ that? _ ” One of the Foxy Pirates yells. 

“What the fuck is  _ that? _ ” Tori returns, looking all too  _ amused  _ with herself. 

“Tori-chan,  _ now!”  _ Sanji tries again. 

“Hey! That’s my  _ hat!”  _ Another pirate shouts. 

“No,” she says, calm as can be. And  _ shit,  _ Zoro is going to  _ murder this kid  _ if she does not get  _ the fuck down here right now—  _

One of the men steps forward, making as if he’s going to try and wrestle his hat back or something. As soon as he moves, Tori is up and in the air, flying back towards them with this  _ ridiculous  _ little  _ I-did-something-I-shouldn’t-have  _ smile that she has to have picked up from Luffy. 

“Hat,” she says, showing Sanji the blue monstrosity she stole. The cook, for his part, looks like he’s about to either shit bricks or sweat bullets. 

“You should give that back,” he says weakly. 

Tori hums and says, “No.” 

“Oh man,” one of the goons on the other crew croons, “Captain is gonna want that thing for sure!.” 

The atmosphere changes in an instant, shifting to something cold and inhospitable. Zoro grips the hilt of his katana tightly. Sanji shifts the barest amount, placing himself firmly between Tori and the other crew. 

They will  _ not _ lose this fight. 

* * *

Tori watches with rapt fascination as the Foxy crew constructs a literal festival on the island complete with food stalls, merchandise booths, and carnival-style games. She clambers up onto Sanji’s shoulders, perching there with her hands planted in his hair. She chatters in his ear, a mix of words and a sort of warbling-trill made low in her throat. 

“Cooky, Cooky,” she chants, none-too-gently tugging his hair in the direction of a cotton-candy stand that Chopper is approaching with wide eyes. 

“Gentle, please, Tori-chan,” he reprimands, coaxing her grabby hands away from his head. 

At his side, Usopp snickers and Sanji is tempted to kick him. 

“What, shitty-sniper?” 

“Nothing, nothing,” Usopp dismisses, smirking. “It’s just that I’m…  _ surprised  _ you let that nick-name stick, is all.” 

Sanji valiantly attempts to fight the embarrassed heat rising to his cheeks. 

“What the hell was I supposed to do? Tell her to call me something else?” 

Usopp blinks at him. “Uh… yes?” 

“Well, she keeps calling Moss-brain  _ ‘Mari’  _ and no matter how many times he tells her to knock it off, she keeps it up,” Sanji argues. 

Usopp shrugs, “I’m just sayin’ that I’m surprised you aren’t more embarrassed, is all.” He peers at Sanji with a blatantly taunting expression. “Are you going  _ soft  _ on us,  _ Cooky?”  _

Sanji kicks him in the shin and Usopp trips with the force of it. Tori  _ shrieks  _ with delighted laughter in his ear. 

Soon after, an announcer’s booming, microphone-assisted voice calls out asking for the contestants to come to the front while the rules of the contest are laid out. As they gather together, Luffy inclines his head to Tori, noodles dangling out of his comically-stretched mouth. 

“Mm fbtt oor pfftat, ‘Ori,” Luffy says, meaning  _ I like your hat, Tori.  _

“I stoled it,” she says proudly, grinning ear to ear in what Sanji would call a distinctly  _ shit-eating  _ manner if she wasn’t literally a child. 

Luffy laughs uproariously. “I bet Nami loved that!” 

“Yes,” Tori replies. 

“Stop encouraging her, you shitty rubber,” Sanji bites out, smacking him once firmly upside the head. 

“Encoo-rag-ing,” Tori parrots, turning over the new word thoughtfully. 

“What?” Luffy whines, pouting into his enormous bowl of noodles. “Pirates are supposed to steal stuff! If she’s gonna be a pirate, she should know that, ne?” 

But before Sanji can wrestle anymore out of the shitty rubber  _ idiot  _ that he calls Captain— _ what do you fucking mean, “if she’s gonna be a pirate”? She’s fucking six, Luffy— _ the beauty belonging to the Foxy-crew, Portia, begins to read out the rules of the game. 

Tori hops down off of his shoulders and goes to stand by Chopper. The two silently begin to share a big stick of pink cotton candy. With Tori a little ways away, Sanji takes the opportunity to light a cigarette, hoping that the nicotine will soothe the sharp ache in his chest. After a moment, he glances up to catch Zoro  _ also  _ staring at the girl and the little doctor, his expression twisted into something…  _ fond.  _

(It looks… surprisingly  _ good  _ on him.) 

Sanji shakes that thought away as soon as it comes, forcing his focus back to the rules of the game. 

(Maybe Usopp  _ is  _ right. Maybe he  _ is  _ getting soft.) 

The beautiful Robin-san takes charge of the roster with the silent agreement that Tori will be left out. All in all, it seems like things will go smoothly and that they might even win a shipwright off of Foxy’s crew. 

Before the boat race, Sanji finds a place for Tori to sit and watch that doesn’t put her in any immediate danger. It takes longer than he anticipated to try to explain what will be happening and it leaves Tori looking visibly frustrated. 

“It’ll be alright,” Sanji assures her. He smooths down her hair while she twists her stolen hat up in her hands and frowns harshly at the ground. 

Tori opens her mouth as if to speak and stops abruptly, looking as though she is thinking very, very hard about something. 

“Will there…” Tori stops and starts again. “Will them…  _ they…  _ make Cooky and Mari and them hurt? Will get hurt?” 

Sanji has to breathe through the emotion that rocks through him like a wave of pain, simply riding it out. He doesn’t want to lie to her and _fuck,_ he couldn’t even bring himself to if he tried, so instead, he opts for honesty. 

“Probably. This is a fight among pirates, little bird. They’ll do their best to beat us and we will probably get a bit roughed up.” She makes a distressed sound, little hands latching tightly onto his wrist. “ _ But,”  _ he assures her, voice firm, “We will do the same to them.” 

“Fight? Like the men in the white?” 

It takes him a minute to understand she’s most likely referring to the marines that they fought that day back on her home island. 

“Yeah, sort of like that.”

Tori pulls on his arm with a whine. 

“It’ll be alright, I promise. It’s like a game, Tori-chan. There are rules we have to follow. That means that nobody will get  _ too  _ hurt and that everything is fair. And our crew is strong. So, I need you to stay here, so that you can both  _ stay safe _ and so that we can follow the rules. Can you do that for me?” 

Sanji shifts his grip so that he can squeeze her hands in his own for reassurance.

“You know what a promise is, right, Tori?” Luffy says, suddenly behind them. 

She blinks up at him. “Promise?”

Luffy crouches down until he’s at eye-level and then he extends his pinky finger out. “We cross pinkies and we swear on it. That’s a promise and you can’t ever break it.” 

Watching Luffy interact with Tori, Sanji thinks he has a little bit better of an understanding about the kind of thing that makes Luffy as magical as he is. The utter confidence of him, the presence that he has, the calm but undeniable weight behind his smile... This is a man that has no secrets, no ulterior motives. Luffy radiates freedom and trust. 

Looking at him now, watching Tori wrap her pinky-finger tight around Luffy’s own, Sanji is reminded of that stupid kid that literally crashed into his life and held Sanji’s own dreams with such tender reverence.  _ Come find the All-Blue with me, Sanji—be my cook!  _ Luffy had said, and following him was as easy and natural as the tide. 

“I promise that we’ll be alright,” Luffy swears to her, smiling ear-to-ear. 

“Yes,” Tori agrees, determined.

They link fingers and swear on it. 

* * *

They lose the race. 

They lose  _ Chopper.  _

Tori doesn’t seem to understand what has happened. She clings to Sanji’s hand like he’ll vanish if she lets go. Her wide eyes shine with tears as she watches Chopper weep from behind the Foxy Pirate’s signature mask. Visibly shaken by Chopper’s display of emotion, even if she doesn’t quite understand  _ why  _ he’s so upset and why the rest of the crew isn’t  _ going to him,  _ she can’t seem to hold still. She shuffles back and forth on her feet in an anxious sway, her wings held tight and rigid to her back. 

And then,  _ of course,  _ Zoro makes it about a million times  _ worse.  _

He reprimands Chopper without even looking at him, curled over a bottle of  _ something  _ that’s no doubt alcoholic. At the first bark of his impressively harsh tone, Tori all but  _ freezes,  _ little nails digging tight into Sanji’s skin like blades. 

She shrinks behind him,  _ cowering  _ behind his legs with an expression like open  _ betrayal  _ on her face. 

“You’re disgraceful,” Zoro shouts, silencing Chopper in a fraction of a second. 

(And of  _ course  _ children like Tori recoil from that tone of voice. How could  _ Zoro  _ be so  _ damn stupid?) _

“It was your choice to become a pirate. Don’t blame it on others. We accepted the challenge—and in the pirate’s world, tears won’t get you  _ anything.”  _

(Sanji remembers this—remembers those words from a lifetime ago.  _ Tears won’t get you anything  _ and the sting of a strong backhand. His brothers' laughter.  _ Tears won’t get you anything _ and the way that crying had only made it even  _ harder  _ to breathe from behind that damn  _ mask.  _

_ You’re a disgrace to the Vinsmoke name— _ and the sound of that  _ name  _ even in only memory scalds and chills him to the bone in equal measure.) 

“If you are a man...” Zoro continues and  _ oh,  _ how Sanji knows that, too.

_ (Real men don’t… Be a real man… Are you man enough?  _ The lessons that Zeff taught him alongside how to properly saute onions, how to grill fish.) 

“Then just sit tight and quietly watch the next game.” 

And  _ oh  _ how Sanji aches to  _ kill  _ him, at this moment. He knows the point—knows exactly what Zoro means and what he’s trying to say.  _ Honor. A man’s pride. His conviction that we will win Chopper back.  _ But  _ fuck  _ if he doesn’t still want to crush the man’s fucking windpipe under his foot. 

“Tactless moron,” Sanji hisses. Tori’s grip on him has loosened, her jaw clenched tight, her shoulders still. 

The second round is called and he and Zoro step into the Groggy Ring. 

* * *

They win and yet, Luffy prioritizes that damn old man’s  _ horse.  _

Zoro does not watch Usopp and Nami’s furious faces. He doesn't watch Chopper’s sorrow and grim determination and not Luffy and his ridiculous glee and not Robin’s nonchalance. Instead, he watches the kid and the Cook. 

Sanji is crouched down to her level while her small, careful hands catalog the blood streaked through his hair and across his face. Head wounds always bleed a lot and the Cook got  _ plenty.  _

Even without hearing them, Zoro can tell that the Cook is talking to her in those low, soothing tones of his. Reassuring her.  _ It’s alright,  _ Zoro can imagine him saying. 

(It makes him furious and Zoro doesn’t know  _ why. _ ) 

* * *

The third round is a derby and Usopp, Nami, and Luffy are testing out their skates before the match starts. One thing becomes immediately clear. 

_ Luffy has no fucking clue how to skate.  _

“Why the hell did you volunteer for this round, then?!” Zoro shouts at him, attempting to correct his stance for the  _ millionth  _ time. 

“I didn’t know this would be so hard!” Luffy complains, falling, yet again, flat on his rubber ass. 

Nami buries her face in her hands. “We’re  _ doomed.”  _

Split-head’s annoying laughter carries over to them. “You could always forfeit,” Foxy sings. An ugly sneer splits his already  _ ugly  _ face right in two. 

“Never,” Luffy hisses. “Shut up, Split-head!”

Someone pulls on the leg of Zoro’s pants. There are only two people on the ship that would do that and Chopper isn’t  _ theirs,  _ right now.

He looks down at Tori. 

Her jaw is set and something  _ fierce  _ burns away in her eyes. 

(The comparison strikes him with all the force of a cannon ball— _ she looks like Kuina. _ )

“I can go  _ fast,”  _ Tori tells him. 

There is  _ will  _ in her voice— _ iron backbone _ —and Zoro is still  _ reeling  _ from the painful overlay of Kuina’s long-dead face and Tori’s own. So,  “You can skate?” is what he blurts.

Tori snatches up the skate-attachments from Luffy’s hands and she’s clearly been watching them fuss with the things, because she gets them on her bare feet easily. They are much too large for her, but she’s doing better than  _ Luffy  _ is (meaning she’s still standing and not visibly struggling to do so.)

“Kid—” Zoro starts but she cuts him off abruptly. 

“Man,” she says, her eyes  _ burning.  _ “ _ Man.  _ 'I f you are a  _ man'. _ ” And she slaps a hand on her own chest, glaring Zoro down like she’s some kind of three-foot-five Sea King. “I will fight.”

She’s pulled all the words straight out of Zoro’s head and in the end, he doesn’t get the first word. In fact, none of them do, because fucking  _ Foxy  _ gets there first. 

“Hah! Mugiwara, I thought you said you only had  _ seven  _ crew members, hm? Only crew can participate in the Davy Back fight,” he taunts, his  _ obnoxious  _ crew members snickering behind him. 

Tori  _ whirls  _ on her heel— _ literally,  _ she’s still got those fucking  _ skates  _ on—and  _ hisses  _ at the man, her wings fully outstretched and her feathers bristled. 

Foxy yelps with surprise and his roller derby team balances, one of them even taking a physical step back. 

“I can be  _ man, _ ” Tori spits. “Won’t  _ cry.”  _ And she turns to Luffy, her eyes absolutely  _ blazing  _ with conviction. “Will  _ win,”  _ she declares. 

Luffy studies her intently, a rare thoughtful look on his face, and the world seems to hold its breath. 

“Tori, you—” Luffy starts and  _ oh shit,  _ her lower lip starts to tremble. 

“I want to  _ help,”  _ she wails. Unshed tears shine in her eyes and her fists quiver at her side. “You all help me! Mari find me and Cooky makes food and Chop-per help me and you,” she inclines her head towards Robin, “teach me letters and you,” then to Nami, “get me clothes” and you,” Usopp, “have best stories”, and finally, to Luffy, “you  _ keep-ed me! _ ” Tori’s voice breaks as she shouts her last words, her face red and her body trembling. 

“No-body keep-ed me,” she says, quiet once more, her eyes far away. “Wrong and  _ an-i-mal,  _ so they hurt me. But you  _ keep-ed  _ me. Cooky and Mari and you  _ keep-ed  _ me and helped me and you promised, but they  _ got hurt. _ ” There is something that is not-quite anger in her eyes. Something wild and unchecked, but not anger. “I can be  _ man.  _ I can help. Win.  _ Please.”  _

Silence rules the arena. Not a soul breathes, not even a single member of the Foxy crew. (One man, perhaps, sniffles from the spectator stands.)

“Tori,” Luffy says after a pause. “Do you know what a cabin-boy is?” 

_ He can’t—  _

“Luffy—” Sanji starts, voice pitched  _ high  _ and almost  _ frightened,  _ but Luffy just holds up a hand and silences him, just like that. 

Nami barrels on, “Luffy!” But he ignores her.

“No,” Tori replies, her brow is furrowed but her face is dry. Not a single tear has fallen, but they threaten to at any moment. 

Luffy scratches his head and hums. “They’re like… kids on pirate ships. They’re crew. Shanks was the Pirate King’s cabin-boy,” he says, smiling one of those  _ I’m-about-to-do-something-exceptionally-ridiculous  _ smiles. Tori does not know who any of those people are, evidently, but she’s staring at Luffy like she might understand what he’s saying and Zoro— 

Zoro hopes he’s reading this— 

( _ Wrong? Right?)  _

“What do you want, Tori?” Luffy asks her and it’s like he’s asking Zoro again, too. (And he didn’t, not really. Luffy never  _ needed  _ to ask him.) 

It takes her no time at all to respond. 

“This,” she replies. 

“Yosh!” Luffy stands, dusting invisible dirt off of his pants. “Tori! Join my crew!” 

A smile as wide and as bright as anything Zoro has ever  _ seen  _ spreads across Tori’s face. Wordlessly, she extends a hand out to Luffy, her pinky-finger outstretched. 

Inconceivably, Luffy shakes it with his own. What they are promising to each other, Zoro cannot  _ fathom.  _

“Luffy, you need to think this through,” Nami is looking  _ frantic.  _

“Tori made her choice, Nami,” Luffy explains, calm as can be and Zoro is  _ not okay with this—  _

…  _ is he okay with this?  _

“Luffy! She’s a child! She can’t make that kind of choice!” Nami cries. 

But that’s not right—Luffy hasn’t  _ forced  _ this choice onto Tori. This, Zoro is sure of. The words don’t quite come—he can’t articulate  _ why— _ and the whole damn roller derby arena is in  _ chaos.  _ Foxy’s crew is  _ cheering  _ and the captain himself is openly  _ weeping,  _ crying about how  _ emotional  _ this all was and how  _ tender.  _ Nami is desperately arguing with Luffy, who is shouting back at her with what amounts to different variations of “I’m the captain” and “why not? Why is it not okay?” Sanji and Usopp are butting in, too. 

“Luffy you can’t—”

“It isn’t safe—”

Chopper is lost somewhere to the heaving crowds of Foxy’s men and Robin— 

Zoro meets her eyes and she is…  _ calm.  _ There is something in her eyes, some emotion that Zoro cannot name, but it is not confusion or swallowed protests. 

_ Oh.  _

Zoro understands, then. This is a _gift_.

Zoro kneels, placing a gentle hand on the crown of Tori’s head. She looks so relived, smiling even as overwhelmed tears roll down her cheeks. 

_ She was worried this whole time.  _

And Zoro wonders how many  _ choices  _ Tori has ever truly been given. There aren’t many choices to be had as an orphan—Zoro knows this because he has  _ lived  _ this. There is no  _ choice  _ in eating out of a dumpster, no choice in catching rats for food. There is no  _ choice  _ in the word “no”, not  _ really.  _ There is  _ fight,  _ yes, but not  _ choice  _ in a word repeated so desperately for lack of any other. And  _ fuck _ , she’s so young that Zoro wonders whether there was even any  _ choice  _ in her devil fruit. How young was she when she ate it? Did she have any other food to speak of? 

Luffy has given her a  _ gift.  _

She had known she was safe. She must have known that for days, now. Ever since she came back to them that night—came back to Sanji in the crow’s nest—she must have  _ known.  _ But children need more than  _ safety.  _

Children need to be  _ wanted.  _

Zoro pulls her into his arms and she comes as easy as anything, folding into him with her head tucked right under his, her hands twisted into his shirt and her shoulders shaking. 

“We want you, kid. It’s okay. You’re staying. You’re crew, Luffy’s decided. We want you,” he murmurs, the words leaving him without any conscious input.

He feels her smile against his chest, pressing her face so tightly to him that he can feel the sharpness of her teeth in it right alongside the wetness of her tears. Zoro allows himself to hug her a little bit tighter. 

It does not matter if he is not her favorite. It does not matter if he is good with kids. Zoro has always been good at this: following where Luffy leads him. And Luffy has led him—led all of them—to her. 

And tucked up against his chest, Tori begins to laugh, her joy expanding around them like a balloon. 

* * *

The derby starts soon after, working like a kind of relay-race. They send Tori out as their final skater. She’ll get the baton from Nami and be up against the cheetah-man from Foxy’s crew in the final leg of the competition, arguably Foxy's strongest contender in this race.

“This is insane,” Sanji hisses, already on his third cigarette, despite the fact that the race hasn’t even begun yet. 

Out on the track, Tori is waiting in her place, just across from the third competitor in Foxy’s crew, the cheetah-man. He’s saying something to her—Zoro can see his mouth moving from where the rest of the Strawhats are sitting. And Tori just ignores him, wings twitching intermittently in a motion Zoro recognizes as a very clear indicator that she is eager to  _ fly.  _

“It’s just a race, Cook,” Zoro replies. 

Sanji scoffs. “You’ve seen how dirty these assholes fight.”

Tori glances at them and waves, smiling. 

“She’ll be fine,” he grumbles, and there’s nothing more to be said before the relay derby starts. 

It’s rough. 

Usopp is first-up and his competitor—a guy from Foxy’s crew nearly twice Usopp’s size—plays dirty from the get-go, using his size to knock Usopp down repeatedly. After a spectacularly nasty fall, Usopp comes up with a bleeding nose and a grim expression. But he keeps going anyways, handing off the baton to Nami and all but _collapsing_ afterwards.

Nami fares a little better, managing to regain some of the time they lost in the first leg of the derby with her quick-thinking, but Sanji was right—Foxy’s crew aren’t playing fair and the distance between Nami and her opponent is just growing larger. But somehow,  _ somehow— _ and Zoro thinks Robin and her devil-fruit had something to do with it—Nami’s opponent fumbles and she manages to catch up, handing off her baton only a few moments after the cheetah-man gets his, Foxy’s man quite literally collapsing there-after.  __

Tori goes off like a shot, but not in the  _ right direction. _ Inexplicably, she's  gunning it for the downed second-runner on Foxy’s team. 

“WHAT IS SHE DOING?” Zoro can hear Usopp  _ scream _ from the track as Sanji lurches to his feet. 

"TORI!" Nami shouts.

Tori jumps, planting her feet solidly on the back of the fallen skater, a man easily  _ three to four times  _ her size, and  _ catapults herself  _ off of him. 

“She used him like a spring-board!” Luffy shouts with delight, leaping to his feet and whooping out encouragement. 

The cheetah might have superior muscle and speed on Tori, but the wind  _ favors  _ her. The leap into the air and the subsequent power of her wings propels her at a much higher velocity that the wheels on the skates only  _ increase _ as she hits the ground again.  And while she skates, she keeps  _ beating her wings straight back,  _ propelling her forward again and again. The distance between her and her opponent is rapidly shrinking as they reach the final turn of the track.

The crowd is  _ screaming _ , their voices so loud that the announcer can’t even be heard over the roar of it. 

“C’mon, Kid,” Zoro breathes. At his side, Sanji is as still and tense as a fucking  _ flagpole.  _

Entering into the turn, Tori crouches down, making herself impossibly small as she sits back on her heels. It’s enough. 

It’s almost like a miracle—an impossibility of physics. With her arms and legs tucked in tight, her wings rigid and pointed nearly straight back behind her, Tori cuts through that remaining distance and like a knife through butter. While the cheetah has to turn and subsequently lose a bit of speed, all Tori has to do is tilt her wings  _ just so,  _ and she doesn’t miss a  _ second.  _

Zoro hears him call out before he sees it, the shout of  _ “Noro-noro beam!”  _ like a bucket of ice-cold water,  and the rage that arcs through him is white-hot.  _ If he hits her—  _

_ C’mon kid—  _

She finishes first by a margin of _six whole seconds_ as Foxy’s beam misses her _completely,_ instead hitting his _own man_ when Tori blows past him _._

The crowd  _ erupts.  _

* * *

“Did you see?! Did you see?!” Tori screeches, jumping up and crashing into Luffy, hitting him in the face with a wing. 

“You were  _ incredible!”  _ Luffy shouts, picking her up and throwing her into the air while she squeals. 

She’s already bounding over to him by the time Sanji makes it down to the track.

“Cooky! Cooky, did you see? I went fast! I  _ won!”  _ and Sanji is helpless to do anything but revel in her excitement, in her  _ delight  _ and her  _ pride,  _ even though there is something cold and dreadful in the pit of his stomach. 

“Did you know, Cook-san,” Robin muses, suddenly materializing behind him in that _way_ that she has, “that birds have hollow bones?” And  _ no,  _ Sanji did not know this, and a deep, instinctual part of him hears that and thinks:

_ Fragile. She’s so fucking fragile. What was Luffy thinking? _

But there isn’t anytime for any of this, because absurdly, the Davy Back fight isn’t even  _ over.  _ Foxy challenges Luffy to one more round _ ,  _ a one-on-one combat of captains. 

“Winner takes all,” Foxy declares. 

They have Chopper back, but Luffy  _ still  _ says yes. 

* * *

It is a hard-fought battle, but Luffy wins it. And, in the end, they don’t even take a shipwright. 

“We already got a new nakama today,” Luffy laughs, ruffling Tori’s hair through her stolen blue bucket-hat. She squawks in indignation, but when she dances away from him, she’s smiling ear to ear. 

“Luffy…” the expression on Nami’s face is pained. 

_ She doesn’t want to have to do this,  _ Sanji realizes, seeing the guilt in her eyes while she looks at Tori. 

But before Sanji can interrupt on her behalf and take that burden from her no matter how much it will hurt, “Don’t,” Zoro interjects. “Sencho already decided.” 

“Z-zoro, you can’t honestly be alright with this—” Nami protests and Sanji is inclined to agree. 

“It’s not your call,” Zoro growls. “It’s between Tori and Luffy.” 

“She’s a child!” Sanji hisses, watching her help Chopper apply bandages to the last of Luffy’s wounds just a little ways away.

“Oh, like you didn’t grow up on a fucking ship full of pirates, Cook,” Zoro bites back. 

“That was different! It wasn’t the fucking  _ Grand Line!”  _

“There are worse ways to grow up,” Robin says cryptically. 

“Robin! She’s only six! You can’t possibly—!” Nami cries.

“It’s  _ not your call, _ ” Zoro growls, voice barely anything but a sinister rumble. The conversation isn’t  _ over,  _ but at that, it effectively ends. 

Tori comes bounding over, babbling something about cannon-balls and how  _ big  _ Foxy’s ship was and how cotton candy is just so good and all the things that _six year-olds_ chatter about. 

_ (I won’t regret bringing her here,  _ Zoro had said that night in the crow’s nest.)

_ No, you shouldn’t,  _ Sanji thinks, something as acrid as bile rising in his throat. 

_ But that doesn’t mean we get to keep her.  _   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bird Fact #1: the great horned owl can fly up to 40mph (65km/h)   
> Bird Fact #2: birds have hollow bones not because it makes them lighter, but because they have air sacs in those spaces that help with oxygenation during flight  
> Bird Fact #3: this chapter was delayed because I took one of my birds to the vet. he is fine, but a bit chonky because i give him cheezits. i now have to attempt to rectify this. changing the food preferences of a 13yo conure is... difficult. this is a bird fact.


	5. Post Long Ring Island

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Good, Sanji-kun. Come here. You should be a part of this conversation, too,” Nami snaps, pinching the bridge of her nose like she’s the one suffering the most, here. 
> 
> “What conversation?” 
> 
> “We have to seriously talk about what we’re going to do with Tori."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "next update will be soon" I said, like a fool  
> Now look at me, 6 months later  
> Big thanks and much love to the folks in the ZoSan discord for inspiring me to keep working on this project, yall are amazing humans 
> 
> No warnings for this chapter, other than it is unbeta'd and barely edited because it is the week before finals and I am tired and barely human right now

After all the excitement has wound down and all that remains of the Davy Back fight is the Strawhats themselves and Tonjit’s small family, Tori climbs up onto Zoro’s shoulders and falls asleep, dead to the world, a small humanoid gargoyle resting their head in a mess of moss-green hair. 

It _doesn’t_ make Sanji’s stomach twist to see Zoro so gentle. Not at _all._ Not in the quiet, careful way he handles her, not in the fond little smiles Sanji catches out of the corner of his eye, not in the steady presence of a hand dwarfing Tori’s back—a wholly unnecessary move as Tori can balance just fine, even while asleep, but it is something Zoro gives her easily nonetheless. 

Zoro is a _brute._ He’s not meant to be gentle or thoughtful or considerate. He’s a meathead and an asshole— _except he’s not,_ not really, and Sanji doesn’t quite know what to do with that. 

(Sanji might call it lucky that he doesn’t have time to process this further, if it were anything else that came next. If it was anything other than an admiral that came to greet them.) 

Aokiji is an intimidating man. But the truly scary thing is the way that he makes Robin _crumble_ before Sanji’s eyes. 

_This is not the woman I know,_ he thinks with a dawning horror just as chilling as the Admiral’s ice. _This is not our archaeologist._

Off to the side, Zoro is gripping Tori’s ankle tight, keeping her on his shoulders even as she bristles and crackles out a low, menacing sound at the man nearly four times her size (and infinite times stronger.) Sanji looks at her little face. He looks at Robin. And he sees the same look in their eyes. 

When Aokiji is done ripping Robin asunder with words that Sanji doesn’t know the true weight of—can’t pick apart or parse with the information he has—the man turns his stoic, unreadable gaze to the snapping, snarling thing crouched over Zoro’s head. 

“So I see Strawhat has a penchant for picking up strays, doesn’t he, Nico Robin?” he drawls, lazy and ice _fucking_ cold. 

_Strays._

Sanji’s blood boils. 

The fight is hardly a fight at all. It’s a mess. It’s a blur. It’s only when Robin and Luffy have been painstakingly thawed and tucked up in the little room Chopper uses as an infirmary does Sanji have a moment to stop and _process._

Luffy had ordered them to go back to Merry. He commanded them—really, truly commanded them—to take Robin, to _leave_ him behind, and it had been one of the hardest moments of Sanji’s entire life. But when the Captain says _go_ and the first-mate begins to move, trusting _you_ too to pick your feet up, throw Tori over your shoulder, keep Nami and Usopp in your sights, and _book_ it like not just yours but _everybodys’_ lives depend on it, you do as you are goddamn _told_. 

“Fuck,” Sanji swears, failing once again to get his lighter to catch a flame. An inquisitive, avian trill abruptly cancels his plans to smoke his frustration away and Sanji pockets the lighter with a sigh as Tori comes swooping low towards the deck from the crow’s nest. 

She lands just a few feet away, staring up at Sanji with those big, unreadable eyes of hers. 

“Where’s Zoro?” Is what he asks her. Sanji wasn’t even sure what he was going to say until his mouth opened and the words just fell out. There is a deep exhaustion—a deep _dread_ inside of him, and the sight of her childish face cruelly echoes Aokiji’s taunt of _stray_ throughout his skull. 

It’s odd how the two of them have formed this wordless balance around Tori. 

Of course, Robin teaches her how to read in the afternoons, Nami allows her to scribble over scraps of useless paper while she works on her maps, and Luffy and Usopp and Chopper keep her entertained with their endless string of absurd games... but it is Zoro and himself that define Tori’s orbit. Her morning begins with Sanji. Her days end with Zoro. She comes to Sanji when she is hurt or sad and she goes to Zoro when she is angry or tired. And the two of them just… accommodate. 

So, Sanji, stressed and overwrought as he is, glances at her and asks, “Where’s Zoro?” 

(Not Marimo, not Moss-head, not Seaweed-for-brains—but _Zoro.)_

“Kitch’n,” she replies, eyes searching. For what, Sanji doesn’t know. He sighs and Tori quickly looks away, staring blankly at the deck. “Them yelling,” she adds after a moment. 

“Who’s yelling?” 

“Mari and Nami. ‘Bout Tori.” 

Sanji balks. “About _you?”_

Cautious in a way she hasn’t been around them for almost a week, now, she shuffles tentatively forward, before visibly steeling herself and gently knocking her head against his knee, little hands gripping at the fabric of his slacks. She nods. 

_Goddammit._

With a hand gentle on the top of her hat, Sanji crouches down to eye level and pulls her in for a brief hug. It tugs at something _fierce_ in his chest when she returns the embrace with a particularly tight grip on his shoulders, like she’s afraid he’ll suddenly start yelling, too. 

Maybe that admiral scared her more than they thought. In the moment, she had been wild-eyed—all bristled feathers and snapping teeth and barely-restrained fury. She had known whether by instinct or by body language, that something was gravely wrong, and the only thing that had kept her back from flying in the face of a _fucking navy admiral_ was Zoro’s grip on her ankle and then Sanji’s arm, pinning her at his hip as they ran lest she fly away, a frozen-Robin over Zoro’s shoulder. 

“Why don’t you go ask Chopper if there’s anything you can help with okay?” He offers. 

Uncharacteristically quiet, Tori only nods before retreating. 

* * *

“It’s not your _call,_ ” Zoro says for the thousandth time today. From across the table, Nami stares him down. She’s at her angriest, fully red-faced and drawn up to her full height as she slaps her hands down on the table. 

“Goddammit, Zoro! How could you be so careless? You had to physically _restrain_ her! Do you honestly think that we won’t be putting her life in just as much danger, if not more, every day she stays with us? What happens when you _aren’t_ already holding her the next time another enemy comes knocking? _What then?_ She charges headfirst into a battle she can’t win? She _dies?!”_

Before Zoro can even begin to respond to that—and _oh,_ he’s _gonna’_ respond to it alright—the door to the galley flies open and bangs against the wall with a loud clatter.

“Marimo! Keep your damn voice down, you’re scaring Tori!” The Cook hisses, cigarette burning like a testament to his anger between his lips. 

The day’s events have left Sanji looking ragged and tired, more so than the prissy cook usually allows the crew to see. Hell, Zoro hasn’t seen him looking this messed up since _Skypiea_. His pale pink shirt is completely untucked, dripping in creased, wrinkled waves down his thighs. His tie is all but completely untied, dangling in a loose knot beneath multiple unbuttoned buttons. His stupid blonde hair is all messed up from the Ball-hat he’d worn just hours earlier and obvious stress is written into every line of his posture. 

(Zoro’s hands twitch at his side.)

“She was shouting, too!” he snaps to avoid thinking about how it might have felt to be Tori, listening in on a conversation like this. 

“Good, Sanji-kun. Come here. You should be a part of this conversation, too,” the witch snaps, pinching the bridge of her nose like _she’s_ the one suffering the most, here. 

“What conversation?” 

“We have to seriously talk about what we’re going to do with Tori,” Nami sighs, frowning at Zoro like _he’s_ the cause of all of this. 

In an instant, Zoro watches the Cook’s eyes shutter, his expression pinched. 

“Ah,” is all he says. After a moment, he scrubs a hand harshly through his hair. “We do, don’t we?” 

“Not you too,” Zoro snaps, _livid_ at the resignation in his tone. He thought, of all people, that Sanji might understand. 

“Please, talk some sense into him, Sanji-kun. We can’t keep her safe and a pirate ship—let alone one as crazy as this—is no place for a kid to grow up—!”

“We aren’t Aarlong, Nami!” Zoro shouts. It cuts through the room like a whip crack. Nami physically reels back, as if struck right across the face. For a flash of a moment, Zoro feels guilty. And then, all he feels is anger. Anger at Nami, for letting her past cloud her judgement and her loyalty to Luffy’s word as Captain. Anger at Sanji, for his cowardice here, for not backing him up when Zoro _knows_ he understands. 

“You don’t get to do that,” Nami whispers, barely audible. Her hair obscures her face and her hands shake with fury at her sides—something Zoro has only rarely seen from her. 

But Zoro just inhales. And he keeps going. 

“Tori is not trapped. Tori is not our prisoner. We didn’t steal her from people who loved her, we aren’t taking her from a perfect childhood, we are giving her freedom and she is _choosing_ us—” 

“Kids don’t get to make calls like that, Zoro! They’re fucking _kids!_ Kids wanna stay up all night and eat candy until they throw up and never bathe and—and—charge _blindly_ at marine admirals that could kill them in a second!”

“Kids know _love,_ Nami!” Zoro erupts. 

And _oh._

_Oh._

He didn’t know the truth of it until he said it. 

_Kids know love._ It twists up, deep in his chest, warm and cold at the same time, filling him up all the way to the top of his head. 

“Kids know when they are loved. She should be able to choose that,” he mutters, feeling like he’s aged twenty years in the span of a single afternoon. 

_Kids know love. She is—_

_Tori is loved._

“Zoro—” His eyes snap to the cook, challenging, but Sanji isn’t looking at him. He’s looking at the floor, cigarette clenched between bone-white fingers. “Nami-swan isn’t wrong. There are… dangers to this that Tori can’t comprehend yet. It isn’t an informed choice.” 

Zoro _laughs,_ loud and harsh. “You think that girl doesn’t know danger? You think that child, littered with scars like _that_ can’t ‘comprehend’ the life we live? It is the first and only rule any kid like Tori learns. It's the only language that comes naturally to a life like that.” 

They lapse into a tense silence. 

Zoro’s heart beats fiercely in his ears. Wado practically _vibrates_ in her sheath at his side, a steady, blazing presence to accompany Zoro’s conviction. _Kids know when they are loved._

“She could have it so much better than us,” Nami speaks at last. 

“And I could still be in East Blue, collecting bounties and baking fucking cookies on the weekend.”

“This is going nowhere,” she huffs, rubbing slow circles into her left temple with her thumb. 

“It’s Luffy’s call in the end, isn’t it?” Sanji says and Zoro— 

Wasn’t expecting it. But, the Cook was raised by former pirates, afterall. He has to know a thing or two about the kind of weight that comes with the title Captain. It’s good to know that the idiot swirly-brow has _some_ fucking sense locked away in that head of his. 

Zoro hadn’t realized he was looking at him so intently until their eyes connect and suddenly Sanji is looking at him, and he at Sanji. The urge to just… _grab_ the Cook by the shoulders and shake him is so fucking overwhelming, it threatens to bowl Zoro over. Instead, he stares him down with everything he’s got, willing Sanji to get it. To do it. 

_Fight for her, dammit._

_Fight for her._

* * *

Dinner is a tense and relatively quiet affair, as far as meals on their ship tend to go. Robin is lost her in own head, looking as distant as the day they met her, all the way back on Whiskey Peak. Even Luffy senses the mood and keeps his hands (mostly) to himself. Tori only picks at her plate, despite how much Sanji urges her to eat just a little bit more. Chopper keeps staring at Luffy and Robin with big, worried eyes, as if the two are going to disappear on him as soon as he turns his back for more than a single second. 

Nami and Zoro keep to themselves, glowering at their respective plates.

Usopp’s throat must be raw for how much effort he put into trying to keep a conversation going for all of them. 

As soon as Zoro finishes his meal and stands to leave, Tori slides out of her seat and latches onto his hand. Sanji watches the easy way Zoro accepts her into his space, as if he had been expecting this all night. After a few steps, just before leaving the galley, Tori holds her arms up in the universal sign for _please carry me._ With hardly a pause, Zoro sweeps her up and Sanji could hardly look away from the sight of her half-closed eyes, her head resting on his shoulder, her wings limp and relaxed like feathered curtains behind her. 

_Kids know love, Nami!_

Long after the others have retired for the night, Sanji sits in the kitchen, head in his hands, wondering how he ever thought he’d be able to let go of her when the time came. 

He’s on his fourth-consecutive cigarette of the night when it occurs to him—it’s true what _they_ always said about his weakness. 

(Sanji who _cares._ Sanji who _feels so much._ Sanji who _cries_ and _whines_ and _cooks,_ his weakness right there and visible for the taking, and how they _did—_ they _took_ time and time again until all that was left of him was a shadow in a cage, not even a name he was allowed to claim. Only a fucking number.) 

He could laugh with it, the fucking _irony._

“They were fucking right,” he half-chuckles, half-whispers to himself. “The bastards were fucking right.” 

“Who was?” 

Sanji jumps, jerking his knee painfully into the underside of the table and nearly dropping his cigarette straight into the glass of wine he’d spent the better part of the hour nursing. Zoro hovers in the doorway to the galley, his wide shoulders barely leaving any space for the night sky to peek through. 

“Fucking hell, Zoro, warn a guy,” Sanji grumbles, taking a sip that’s more of a gulp than anything at this point. He sighs after another minute of Zoro’s sentry act. “Sit down, I’ll get you some booze.” 

“It’s fine. I know where it is.” 

Reluctantly, Sanji stays seated. “Don’t fuck up my cupboards, you got that?” 

“Yeah, yeah.” 

He buries his head in his arms, listening idly to the clinking of bottles and glassware as Zoro putzes around for liquor. Sanji’s just so fucking _tired_ but way too keyed up to sleep. He drifts for a moment or two until Zoro’s weight settles on the other side of the table, a bottle of rum making a dull _thunk_ against the wood that Sanji feels on his forehead. 

“What did you mean, ‘they were right’?” 

“Not gonna’ pretend you didn’t hear that one, are you, Moss-head?” His glass is almost empty. A single finger of red wine remains, not a drop more, and he left the bottle in the cabinets. 

Zoro swallows his drink. It’s a heavy sound on a quiet night. “Should I?” 

“Probably.” 

Sanji is _tired_ but he’s not tired enough to miss Zoro’s unsubtle attempt at stealing his pack of cigarettes right out from under his nose. 

“Give those back,” he grumbles, too tired to make more of a scene about it. 

“How many have you had?” 

Sanji rolls his eyes. “Not enough to get Chopper truly pissed. Give ‘em.” 

Something _dangerous_ flashes in Zoro’s eyes. “I will. If you tell me who ‘they’ are and what ‘they’ were right about.”

“Hah!” He downs the rest of his wine and makes a half-hearted, unsuccessful swipe for the pack. Zoro evades him, easily. “C’mon, really?” 

_Coward,_ a voice whispers. _He told you his secrets but you won’t dare to do the same. You’ve always been a coward—always been weak like this._

Sanji fiddles with the ashtray. He sighs to stave it off, but knows he’s already made up his mind. He knows that he does not _owe_ Zoro this. Another part of him (and not that vicious part, not the one that serves to cut him at his weakest) thinks he should do it anyways. 

“It’s not a very good story,” he mumbles. 

Zoro shrugs. “I don’t expect it to be.” 

Sanji leans back in his chair, rocking up on the back legs so he can stare at the ceiling. 

“Once upon a time,” he starts, half-joking and half-severe, only sure of what he’s about to say moments before it actually escapes him, “There was a powerful kingdom that suddenly wasn’t so powerful anymore. The ruler was a cruel man, the kind of guy that covets war and power like others do wealth, so he performed experiments on his pregnant wife and her unborn kids.” His throat runs dry, his hands clammy. Sanji presses on, trailing the swirling grain of Merry’s wood with his eyes. “There were five. One girl and four boys, only the third boy was a failure. Each of them were designed to be the perfect warrior. But not him, because the ruler’s wife had been clever to her very last breath. 

“The soldier boys were made to be strong and most importantly, they were made to be devoid of emotion. But not the third brother. It… they found out, eventually. What the ruler’s wife had done, and what the third brother was. So they locked him away in a dungeon.” He hates how his voice cracks when he says, “And they told the kingdom he _died._ But he didn’t die. He was just… there. Beneath them. Waiting for it. And hoping desperately, beyond all hope, that it wouldn’t. The ruler and the brothers and the sister, too, called him weak for what he was. For what he felt and what they did not.”

Sanji laughs and it’s a bitter, hollow sound. 

“They said it would be his downfall. That the third brother _cared._ That he loved.” 

Merry groans on the water, a great settling of wood. A sigh. Zoro is silent. 

“I told you it was a shitty story.” 

Zoro drains his glass dry. The empty glass settles audibly against the tabletop as Sanji tips his chair back onto all four legs and goes to stare at the ashtray instead. He fucks with his hair idly, just to remind himself that he can. 

“You’re an idiot,” is what Zoro finally says. 

“Oi—” 

“You’re an idiot to think that they were right.” Zoro’s eyes _burn_ with the same vicious conviction that Sanji has seen time and time again across battlefields. An involuntary shiver rolls down his spine. “They were wrong. And you’re an idiot.” 

Sanji can’t help but chuckle at that, chuckle at the absurdity of this whole mess. Zoro cracks just the smallest sliver of a smile and they lapse into a heavy, but oddly comfortable silence.

“I’ve never told anyone that before,” Sanji confesses as Zoro slides the cigarettes back across the table. The urge to light up has strangely subsided, so he simply tucks the pack back into the pocket of his sleep-pants. 

Zoro hums. “How does it feel?”

“Shitty.” He scrubs a hand rough across his face. “Feels fucking shitty.” 

_“Cooky!”_

Both of them lurch to their feet at the sound of a desperate, terrified little voice. _Tori._

The door flies open and a red, tear-streaked face greets them. She stands just inside the kitchen, shaking like a leaf, wings tucked up tight and flat against her body, and sobbing like she just couldn’t stop if she tried.

They break at the same moment and race to her. 

Sanji gets there first, sweeping her up and into his arms without a single moment's hesitation, every inch of him _screaming_ to hold her close. Zoro’s hands hover, brushing hair gently aside from her wet face and checking for injuries with swift, yet gentle efficiency. 

“What’s wrong, princess? What’s wrong?” Sanji murmurs, petting soothing strokes down the length of her back between her wings. He remembers vaguely that his mother used to do the same for him when he cried. 

“Are you hurt?” Zoro asks, wiping tears off of her cheeks with infinitely gentle hands. 

“Bad sleep,” Tori cries between huge, hiccuping breaths. “Bad sleep, bad people were there, and when I—when I ‘oke up—” she dissolves into tears again, one hand clutching tight at Zoro’s wrist while she buries her wet face into Sanji’s neck. 

“When you woke up, I wasn’t there,” Zoro finishes. 

There is undeniable, stark naked pain in his eyes when Sanji dares to look. Impulsively, he reaches out for him—squeezes his upper arm in a way that he hopes is reassuring. 

“We were here, little bird,” he murmurs, keeping a tight hold on them both. “We were right here.” 

“Please d-don’t put me back— _please,”_ Tori wails in a voice so, so fucking _small_ and Sanji thinks _oh,_ the things that I would _break_ to keep you safe and smiling. 

_“Never,”_ Zoro promises, his voice heavy and serious and aching just as much as Sanji is. Gently, Zoro nudges her face towards him and bends slightly to look her straight in the eyes. “Never. You are _nakama,_ Tori.” 

And she clings to them both, little feathers quivering in time with her sobs, bracketed on both sides by two people coming to the very same realization. 

_I will not ever let go._

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory link to my [tumblr](https://trixree.tumblr.com/)


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